The current pricing for crypto data APIs (CoinGecko/CMC) is based on a legacy requirement: maintaining hundreds of real-time websocket connections to centralized exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, etc.). That infrastructure is heavy, expensive, and requires constant maintenance to filter wash-trading and normalize order books. But if you are building for DeFi, that data is technically irrelevant. The "real" executable price is on-chain (Uniswap, Raydium, Curve). I realized that if I just ignored the CEXs entirely and only indexed the blockchain, I could drop the cost basis by an order of magnitude. So I built qoery.com It indexes DEX logs directly from RPC nodes. It doesn't touch centralized exchange data. The Trade-off: If you need global VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price) including Binance/Coinbase, this API is useless to you. If you need the actual on-chain price for a dApp or wallet, this is the exact same data as the big guys, but ~85% cheaper (starts at $3.99 vs ~$35). I’m curious if there are edge cases I’m missing where a DeFi app would strictly require off-chain CEX data? |