Kraken, a bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange with offices in San Francisco and Europe today announced the upcoming launch of a public WebSocket API. This is a service that many clients of the company have requested, because it enables faster and easier access to Kraken’s market data.
The API is will be freely available for anyone to use. Users can now connect to the sandbox environment try the WebSocket API. The documentation can be found online now (users will need to use the URL for the sandbox API).
The main advantage is that market data will quickly stream to clients with no polling required. Clients simply use the API to establish a strong, low latency connection with Kraken’s servers, then the servers will push the market data incrementally to clients as soon as an update is available.
The approximate worldwide launch time in various time zones:
UTC: Wednesday, January 30 at 5 PM
ET: Wednesday, January 30 at 12 PM
PT: Wednesday, January 30 at 3 PM
CET: Wednesday, January 30 at 6 PM
HKT: Thursday, January 31 at 1 AM
Kraken also said they plan to later launch a private WebSocket API but no ETA is available at this time.
“The WebSocket protocol provides the best foundation to stream real-time data and build trading applications. Kraken’s WebSocket public API is just the first phase of a much larger project that will bring many cutting edge services to Kraken clients!”
