Methodology
This page documents how every number on Coinpric is produced. If something here is out of date or wrong, that is a defect — tell us and we will correct it and log the change on our corrections page.
Where the prices come from
We use free, public market-data APIs and no proprietary feed. Requests are made server-side and cached; your browser never calls a data provider directly. Providers are tried in a fixed order and the first one that returns usable data wins:
- CoinGecko — first in the chain. At the time of writing our server is rate-limited by CoinGecko and this rung returns nothing, so in practice it is skipped. We leave it first so the site upgrades itself automatically if that changes.
- CoinLore — currently the provider actually serving our market tables, rankings, market caps, 24-hour and 7-day changes, supply figures and BTC/ETH dominance.
- CoinPaprika — a further fallback. Our monthly free-tier quota is presently exhausted, so this rung also returns nothing today.
- Binance public API — last resort for prices. It gives us a live price and 24-hour change for a fixed, explicitly listed set of major assets, but no market cap or ranking. When the chain falls this far, those columns are left empty rather than filled with a guess.
Price history for charts and sparklines comes from Binance candlesticks: four-hour closes for seven-day views, daily closes for one month and longer. The Fear & Greed Index comes from Alternative.me.
Every module on the site displays which provider its figures came from and when they were last refreshed. If you see “CoinLore” under a table, that is literally where those numbers came from.
How often it refreshes
- Status tape (the prices in the top bar) — about every 60 seconds
- Market pulse, market tables and coin prices — every 5 minutes
- Sparklines and price-history charts — hourly
- Fear & Greed Index — hourly
A scheduled job on our server refreshes these on the intervals above, so a page view never waits on a provider. If data ages past ten minutes we label it Delayed in the interface rather than presenting it as current.
What “delayed” and “indicative” mean here
Our prices are aggregated reference prices, not quotes from a venue you can trade on. They can differ from the price on any given exchange, and during fast-moving markets they can lag. Do not use them to make an execution decision.
When data is missing
If we cannot source a figure, we leave it out. We do not print a zero, a dash or a placeholder in a slot where a real number belongs, and we do not carry a number over from a different asset or a different source and present it as this one. A module whose data is entirely unavailable is removed from the page rather than shown empty. If a table looks shorter than you expected, that is why.
When every provider fails, we may serve the last figures we successfully retrieved, clearly labelled with their age. We never fabricate a value to fill the gap.
How “Priced at Publication” is computed
This is our signature device, and it is deliberately simple.
When an article about a specific asset is published, we read that asset’s price from the live layer once, at that moment, and store it against the article along with the UTC timestamp. That stored value is never recomputed, re-read or edited — not when the article is updated, not when it is re-saved, not ever. Alongside it we show the current price and the percentage change between the two.
If no trustworthy price was available at the moment of publication, we record the timestamp only and show no frozen price. We never back-fill one afterwards, because a price captured later is not the price the piece was written at.
The change since publication is not a performance claim, a recommendation, or a record of our calls. It is a timestamp with a number attached. We do not aggregate these figures into any kind of track record, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does.
Corrections
If a figure on this site is wrong, we would rather know. Errors of fact are corrected and logged publicly on our corrections page, with what changed and when.