Bitcoin Exchange API Observations

A new project has prompted me to investigate the trading APIs belonging to a number of Bitcoin exchanges. It’s been a fun few weeks and I’ve learned a lot about an area I’ve never really watched in the past.

Credit has to be given to Vault of Satoshi and justcoin for having particularly well behaved APIs (though justcoin does have to be reverse engineered from their trading platform’s source).

However, as expected it’s not all been rainbows and unicorns. At least one exchange has a public API which does not even pretend to work, and most fall into a series of common traps. Hopefully I can use the following notes to design better APIs myself: