Getting the Price Shouldn’t Be This Hard

There’s no FIX, no shared structure, and no agreement on what a message should even look like.

In this episode, Tim and Marcus dig into the reality of trying to collect market data across crypto venues, and why getting a simple price feed turns into a full-blown engineering nightmare. From WebSockets and REST to custom APIs and protobuf hacks, every crypto exchange speaks its own language. Even if you can connect, you’re dealing with broken docs, random tags, strange compression, and protocols that change with zero notice. And that’s just to get the price... let alone quote or trade.

 

This is what makes building a market maker in crypto so much harder than TradFi. No standards. No consistency. Just vibes.

 

Also in this episode:

• Why FIX works in TradFi (and why crypto doesn’t use it)
• How venues like Coinbase and Binance structure market data
• What it takes to build a proper market data adapter
• Why some venues still require polling like it’s 2009

 

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https://x.com/timmeggs | Marcus (the other one)