Bringing Exchange Metadata to the Surface

A Major Upgrade to Our Markets and Instruments Endpoints

We’ve rolled out a major structural upgrade to the GET /markets and GET /markets/instruments endpoints. With the new groups parameter, you can now retrieve scoped, structured metadata on exchanges and instruments—previously only available to internal systems.

This update delivers stable, schema-consistent metadata for Spot, Futures, Options, and DEX markets. Whether you're debugging ingestion, filtering listings, or automating compliance, you now have direct API access to detailed metadata blocks such as launch dates, integration modes, benchmark scores, wallet mappings, and more.

What Changed

The new groups parameter lets you request exactly the data you need: BASIC, INTEGRATION_SPOT, INTEGRATION_DERIVATIVES, BENCHMARK, RESOURCE_LINKS, and other domain-specific metadata groups.

Each product type returns its own group-specific extensions. Spot markets expose fields like HAS_SPOT_TRADES_STREAMING and SPOT_ORDER_BOOK_INTEGRATION_STAGE. Derivatives return expiry data and contract types. All products support consistent top-level fields like EXCHANGE_STATUS, LAUNCH_DATE, MAPPED_INSTRUMENTS_TOTAL, and benchmark scores when applicable.

GET https://data-api.coindesk.com/spot/v1/markets
  ?market=binance
  &groups=BASIC,INTEGRATION_SPOT,BENCHMARK

{
  "binance": {
    "EXCHANGE_STATUS": "ACTIVE",
    "LAUNCH_DATE": 1499990400,
    "CCDATA_LATEST_SPOT_BENCHMARK_GRADE": "AA",
    "MAPPED_INSTRUMENTS_TOTAL": 2966,
    "HAS_SPOT_TRADES_STREAMING": true,
    "SPOT_TRADES_INTEGRATION_STAGE": "IN_PRODUCTION",
    "HAS_ORDERBOOK_L2_MINUTE_SNAPSHOTS_ENABLED": true,
    "INSTRUMENT_STATUS": {
      "ACTIVE": 1460,
      "RETIRED": 1531,
      "RETIRED_UNMAPPED": 213,
      "IGNORED": 0,
      "EXPIRED": 0
    },
    "TOTAL_TRADES_SPOT": 75987263580
  }
}

All metadata fields follow the official OpenAPI spec—fully capitalized, grouped, and version-aware.

Why It Matters

Until now, developers and analysts had limited visibility into the operational status and ingestion quality of markets. Determining whether an exchange was actively integrated, supported streaming, or had a decent benchmark grade typically required internal tools or hardcoded assumptions. This often led to brittle systems, redundant logic, and frequent mismatches between frontend behavior and backend reality.

By exposing this metadata via the API using the groups parameter, we’ve eliminated the need for static lists and one-off fixes. Developers can now implement real-time, rule-based filters across UIs, pipelines, and ingestion logic. You can automatically exclude inactive venues, flag under-integrated markets, or build dynamic dashboards—all using consistent, structured metadata that is version-aware and OpenAPI-compliant.

The availability of benchmark scores, integration stages, and instrument statuses at the API layer also reduces support overhead and accelerates development. Whether you're debugging missing data, automating QA checks, or designing risk filters, the API now serves as a single source of truth—mirroring what our own ingestion and compliance systems use internally. This enables faster iteration, smarter decision-making, and higher trust across the entire product lifecycle.

Expanded Use Cases

This metadata unlocks a wide range of downstream use cases across engineering, analytics, operations, and compliance. Whether you're debugging integration issues, building exchange filters, or designing risk automation workflows, the structured fields exposed through groups allow for robust, real-time logic without backend dependencies.

Below are concrete use cases now supported by this release:

• Market Comparison - Use benchmark grades, mapped instrument totals, and integration mode fields to compare exchanges across objective metrics. Filter out inactive or under-integrated venues, or rank based on ingestion health and data quality.
• Strategic Planning - Leverage fields like LAUNCH_DATE, TRADING_PERMANENTLY_SUSPENDED_DATE, and SPOT_TRADES_INTEGRATION_DATE to track integration lifecycle and product maturity. This helps assess the long-term stability and coverage footprint of exchanges.
• Dev-Driven Filtering - Build parsers, ingestion pipelines, or UI backends that automatically exclude markets that don’t meet ingestion or benchmark criteria. Rules like “only list markets with STREAMING support and GRADE >= B” become trivial to implement.
• Dynamic Product Listings - Use real-time metadata to populate or update listings in wallets, analytics dashboards, or broker platforms. For example, filter by HAS_SPOT_TRADES_STREAMING or EXPIRY_TIMESTAMP for up-to-date instrument lists.
• QA and Debugging - Access operational states like INSTRUMENT_STATUS, SPOT_ORDER_BOOK_INTEGRATION_STAGE, or HAS_SPOT_TRADES_POLLING to investigate missing data or regressions. No backend access or internal tools required.
• Risk and Compliance Automation - Automate onboarding filters and audit pipelines using CCDATA_LATEST_*_BENCHMARK_GRADE, EXCHANGE_STATUS, or RESOURCE_LINKS (e.g., incorporation docs, certifications). Reduces manual review time and standardizes risk logic.
• Research and Education - Academic and industry researchers can use the API to study exchange lifecycles, integration patterns, and benchmark histories without static exports or manual data prep.

What’s Next

This release establishes a static metadata foundation built on stable, query-scoped groups. Over the next few quarters, we’ll continue to expand the metadata surface with additional semantic layers—accessible via the same groups interface and without any changes to the core schema. These additions are designed to support deeper automation, live observability, and editorial consistency across product surfaces.

• Top Instruments per Exchange - We’ll introduce a new metadata group that returns ranked instrument lists per market. This will allow you to query the most relevant pairs or contracts on an exchange based on volume, liquidity, or open interest. For example: top 10 BTC/USDT markets on Binance or the highest OI ETH options on Deribit. These rankings will be normalized across venues, optionally filtered by asset or instrument type, and exposed as structured sub-objects under the same market payload. This unlocks dynamic listing UIs, curated screens, and simplified discovery APIs without needing to reassemble volume metrics from scratch.
• Live Signal Metadata - A new set of groups will expose real-time ingestion and quality signals derived from our internal observability pipeline. These include ingestion uptime, stale update rates, volume dominance (as a share of asset-class activity), order book imbalance metrics, and machine-learned wash trading probability. These signals are computed per market and/or instrument and are intended to feed into alerting dashboards, quality monitors, trading filters, or scoring engines. Use this to flag unstable integrations, deprioritize noisy venues, or detect structural issues—without querying logs or interpreting trade patterns manually.
• Benchmark and Health Indexing - Beyond the current static benchmark scores, we’ll start exposing internal health indices that reflect the ongoing operational behavior of each exchange and instrument. These are continuously updated and model-based, incorporating ingestion health, mapping consistency, message throughput, and lifecycle metadata. You’ll be able to access metrics like INGESTION_SCORE, MAPPING_COVERAGE, or DERIVATIVE_UPDATE_FREQUENCY and build them into dashboards, compliance rules, or analytics layers. This creates a machine-readable proxy for integration quality and exchange maturity—more granular than a benchmark grade and usable in live systems.
• Editorial and AI Integration - Several new groups will provide structured metadata to support AI-generated summaries, tag classification, and frontend content automation. Fields like BENCHMARK_SUMMARY, or INTEGRATION_NOTES will be tailored for embedding into exchange profiles, partner dashboards, or editorial surfaces on CoinDesk. These fields are designed to replace markdown copy/paste workflows with dynamic, metadata-driven snippets that evolve with the underlying data. This will also enable AI models to pull accurate operational context directly from source without relying on outdated text or manually maintained profiles.‍
• Exchange Events - A dedicated endpoint that will track historical and upcoming events tied to specific exchanges. This includes scheduled maintenance windows, major outages, exchange listings on traditional stock markets, leadership changes, security incidents, and notable regulatory actions. Events will be structured with timestamps, categories, and severity tags—enabling UIs, monitoring tools, and compliance systems to display or react to key operational milestones with full historical context.

All of these features will be delivered either as additional groups within existing endpoints or as new endpoints alongside the markets endpoint. No schema migrations or breaking changes are required. If the data is exposed via groups, you simply extend your existing queries to include the new group keys. If surfaced via new endpoints, they’ll follow the same schema conventions, naming patterns, and metadata structure—ensuring seamless integration with your existing parsers and systems. The result: richer, real-time metadata with minimal development overhead.

How to Use the Market Metadata Groups

Integrating metadata groups is fast and flexible. Simply add the groups query parameter to your API calls to retrieve exactly the structured metadata you need—such as BASIC, INTEGRATION_SPOT, BENCHMARK, and more—scoped cleanly by product type and standardized across all endpoints.

This design allows you to build intelligent ingestion systems, automate UI behavior, and develop QA and compliance logic directly against the live API. All fields are stable, OpenAPI-documented, and version-aware, ensuring consistency across product releases.

Explore the relevant endpoints here:

• Spot: Markets — Markets + Instruments
• Futures: Markets — Markets + Instruments
• Options: Markets — Markets + Instruments
• Derivatives Indices: Markets — Markets + Instruments
• On-Chain AMMs: Markets — Markets + Instruments

To learn more or request support, get in touch with our team.