The Beginner's Guide to Crypto API Trading

Trading crypto with an API allows you to access historical and real-time market data, as well as manage, place, modify, and cancel orders from your own interface without delays.

Requiring a combination of trading expertise and coding skills, you can automate executing trading strategies that would otherwise be unavailable with manual trading.

Let's go through the basics of crypto API trading so you too can identify and capitalise on opportunities without human intervention.

A Quick Explanation of How Crypto API Trading Works

An API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface. The word “interface” means the point where two systems talk to each other and share information. In the case of a crypto trading API, it’s the crypto exchange and your program that’s talking.

The things you can talk about may include:

• Current and historic market data

• Submitting trade orders

• Buying and selling different cryptocurrencies

• Withdrawing cryptocurrencies from your wallets

• Withdrawing fiat

All this talking has to happen in a shared language with shared definitions. For example, here’s what using VALR’s API looks like to make a buy order for 0.0008 of Bitcoin.

curl --location 'https://api.valr.com/v1/simple/adabtc/order' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'X-VALR-API-KEY: yourApiKey' \
--header 'X-VALR-SIGNATURE: e6669da57358f6b838f83f5ea5118a9ec39f71ae9018b9e4a1e0690fd3361208a4b0be4c84966792f302b600a69cf82c257722774a44ac1850570cfedd6053c4' \
--header 'X-VALR-TIMESTAMP: 1560007630778' \
--data '{
    "payInCurrency": "BTC",
    "payAmount": "0.0008",
    "side": "BUY"
}'

The response you’d receive if the purchase was successful is:

{
  "id": "9fed72b4-5d59-4bd7-b4fc-26cf43d27c94"
}

You can then talk further about this purchase using that transaction ID as reference. You’ll also notice in the buy order message the line:

--header 'X-VALR-API-KEY: yourApiKey' \

That’s required because the crypto exchange needs to know who it is talking with. An API key is the unique identifier that the crypto exchange gives you that you must use when talking with it so it knows who you are. It’s extremely important to keep your API key a secret.

The Pros and Cons of Leveraging an API to Buy and Sell Crypto

While API trading can make things faster and take emotions out of the equation, don't jump in without knowing it needs some serious tech skills and comes with its own set of risks.

Pros	Cons
Respond to changing market conditions in a fast way	Technical knowledge and trading expertise are mandatory for creating and executing trading strategies via a crypto exchange API
Access historical and real-time market data	Ongoing regulatory concerns related to high-frequency trading
Buy and sell digital assets without human intervention	Technical flaws increase the risks of financial losses
Capitalise on opportunities with 24/7 automated trading strategies
Trade crypto without the negative impacts of emotions

Think You Have What it Takes to Start Trading Crypto via API?

Then set up and start executing your trading strategies through VALR’s API. We provide a powerful API consisting of REST endpoints for transactional operations and a complementary Websocket service providing streaming market, order, and balance updates.

Besides the ability to engage in high-frequency trading with >99% uptime and high rate limits, our crypto exchange API enables you to maximise your opportunities. After establishing a connection to VALR, you can create positions across spot, margin, and perpetual futures markets with up to 5x leverage across all major digital asset pairs.

Additionally, VALR's API supports shared accounts with various permissions, which come in handy for institutional investors, trading firms, family offices, and enterprise customers.

Have any questions? Contact our support team for tailored assistance.

Risk Disclosure

Trading or investing in crypto assets is risky and may result in the loss of capital as the value may fluctuate.

VALR (Pty) Ltd is a licensed financial services provider (FSP #53308).