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The quality of cryptocurrency market data is critical for academic research and financial applications, and yet, the industry faces a number of challenges

The quality of cryptocurrency market data is critical for academic research and financial applications. Yet, the industry faces a number of challenges, including pervasive mislabeling, measurement errors and discrepancies in reported market metrics.

A new academic research by Gustavo Schwenkler of the Santa Clara University, alongside Aakash Shah and Darren Yang of Indicia Labs, highlights these persistent issues, emphasizing the difficulty of relying on a single provider for all crypto market data needs.

The researchers reviewed 20 of the most common crypto market data providers, examining their crypto data from January 2022 to October 2024. An in-depth analysis of a subset of eight providers – CoinCap, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, CoinPaprika, CryptoCompare, Live Coin Watch, Nomics, and Santiment – from November 2018 to October 2024 revealed concerning trends.

The analysis revealed a substantial level of inconsistency in how cryptocurrencies are identified. As much as 21% of all coins in a provider’s dataset could undergo ID changes within a 24-month period without any disclosure, rendering direct comparisons across time difficult.

Moreover, some providers kept the same ID for a coin even after a fork or a swap that rendered a new coin, effectively misrepresenting the asset’s identity. Additionally, certain providers used the same ID for distinct cryptocurrencies, a problem encountered in 16% of the sample from CoinGecko.

This analysis also unveiled significant inconsistencies in the reported data across providers. For instance, the daily close price for a cryptocurrency can vary to a great extent from one provider to another. In extreme cases, the price discrepancies at the close of a particular day could be quite large.

These inconsistencies arise because providers collect and aggregate data from various public platforms. Because providers have discretion over which prices they select at any given time and how they aggregate them, inconsistencies are to be expected.

Beyond price discrepancies, trading volume metrics also exhibit strong variations across providers. This is especially pervasive for reported volumes, where in almost 70% of the daily instances in the six-year sample, the daily aggregate volume for a coin reported by a provider deviated by more than 5% from the median volume reported across providers.

This issue is particularly prominent for large coins that are listed on many exchanges and is exacerbated by the practice of wash trading, where exchanges artificially inflate their reported trading volumes to appear more liquid.

In traditional capital markets, data is standardized across large vendors or by regulatory bodies. However, the crypto industry lacks such standardization, with providers differing in data definitions, delivery technologies, and reporting methodologies.

As digital assets gain traction among institutional investors, the demand for robust and reliable market data infrastructure has intensified as investors seek high-quality data for informed trading strategies and regulatory compliance.

This has fueled the growth of crypto data providers like CCData, CoinDesk, Compadre, CryptoCompare, Digital Asset Analytics, Factor Factor, FTX, Kaiko, Lungo, and TRM offering cleansed and normalized data from multiple independent sources, despite the absence of agreed data quality standards or auditing. These sources include blockchains themselves, but also centralized exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi), and derivatives markets.

Beyond consolidating and normalizing data, some vendors also deliver derived metrics, signals, and indicators, empowering clients with actionable information. For instance, DeFi analytics providers like DefiLlama and DeFiPulse provide insights into liquidity pool sizes, interest rates, and other crucial metrics within the decentralized finance ecosystem.

Crypto data is a rapidly emerging sub-industry that’s playing a significant role in the broader digital asset ecosystem. Explored in a new report by Financial Technology (FT) Partners, a fintech-focused investment bank, this ecosystem encompasses five main verticals:

This sector has seen a strong interest from investors, with major funding rounds such as Chainalysis’s $170 million Series F, Lukka’s $110 million Series E, and Kaiko’s $53 million Series B.

In terms of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity, prominent players like Chainalysis, Lukka and Amberdata have been acquiring smaller startups to integrate new technologies and expand their product offerings.

Chainalysis acquired Excygent, a specialist in cybercrime investigation; Transpose, a blockchain data and infrastructure company; and Alterya, an AI-powered fraud detection solution provider. Meanwhile, Lukka acquired Blox Finance, a crypto accounting and financial data management software business; Venato, a Web3 blockchain analytics startup; and Coinfirm, a top-tier European based blockchain analytics software company.

On the other hand, Kaiko acquired Kesitys, a data analytics company; and Vinter, a leading European crypto index provider.