Top Solana DEX Trade APIs
Q1 2024 saw a lot of growth and massive returns for Solana traders, coupled with the meme coin mania that overtook the community and almost everyone purchasing random meme coins with an immeasurable level of speculation. Let’s not forget about the presale incident that lasted for over a week on X. During this time, hundreds of people, including both experienced traders and beginners, sent money to anonymous crypto traders on X in the hopes of getting a share in the presale.
To equip readers with some tools to get the latest Solana information, we are going to dive into the Solana ecosystem and explore its DEX Trade APIs in full momentum.
If you have traded Solana-based tokens or memecoins, you have likely used a decentralized exchange on Solana or a bot that is connected to a DEX via the backend and executes trades within seconds. This is why most people refer to them as sniper bots.
The top five Solana DEXes as of time of this writing are:
- Raydium
- Orca
- Phoenix
- Meteora
- Lifinity
DEX Trade APIs Explained
Supposing you are coming across the phrase “DEX Trade APIs” for the first time and wondering what the hell it even means, don’t worry let me explain in a short summary.
DEX Trade APIs are application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that allow anyone to interact with the exchange’s trading functions on a whole new technical level. It can enable anyone to automate trading, access market data, and key metrics for intelligent insights, manage orders, and perform other trading-related operations.
Features of a DEX Trade API include the following:
- Order placement and Management
- Market Data
- Account Management
- Trade History
- WebSocket Support for real-time data streaming and market updates
- Smart Contract Interaction
All these features are essential for traders and developers looking to build automated trading bots, applications that interact with the DEXs, and market analysis. But for the purpose of this article, we will be making use of the DEX Trade APIs for market data and analysis as we are not building a trading bot :)
Top Sources for Solana DEX Trade APIs
1. Bitquery
Bitquery is a leading blockchain data provider that indexes over 40+ blockchains and provides GraphQL APIs and WebSocket for developers and users looking to get into DEX trading and on-chain analytics.
Bitquery also provides complete on-chain Solana information in real time. This includes specific events on the Solana blockchain, real-time DEX Trades, latest tokens launched on Solana, and the trading metrics using the API.
Recall when we mentioned earlier that Raydium is the leading decentralized exchange on the Solana blockchain, it is also important to understand how it works and Bitquery has a dedicated section on Raydium DEX API which allows you to specifically query the DEX for latest trades, trades on specific currencies and OHLC data.
The second largest dex on Solana which is Orca also has its own dedicated documented API here
With Bitquery, you can query multiple data points related to dex trades. This includes the following:
- Trade History: Get details about the tokens traded on different decentralized exchanges, including the prices of tokens traded, token information, trade volumes, and timestamps.
- Market Statistics: Get an overview of the market by monitoring trading volumes, liquidity, price movements, and other market metrics.
- Trade Execution Details: Fetch block confirmation time, gas fees, and other trade-related data on the blockchain network on Orca, Raydium, and other DEXs.
- Trading Pools: Information about liquidity pools and also tokens in the pool, pool sizes, and other relevant data. Here is an example of Raydium pools
- Monitor real-time balance changes across the Solana blockchain. You can get the balance updates of a particular wallet, track NFT balances in real time, and the latest balance of any address on Solana.
- Solana Instructions API : Retrieve the latest instructions executed on the Solana blockchain including details like indices of preceding instructions signer, signature, balance updates, and program details.
- Solana Logs API : The Solana Logs API lets you search for particular instructions by searching for log content that matches exact phrases. This is useful as it helps for debugging and analyzing transactions on the Solana blockchain, particularly when looking for specific error messages or conditions in the transaction logs.
Get started for free with the developer plan. You can refer to the video tutorials available on their YouTube channel.
2. SolanaFM
SolanaFM provides equitable access to Solana’s full historical data through efficient and dynamic APIs, powering the Solana ecosystem, and showcasing on-chain data & analysis. This infrastructure enables you to query data beyond the limits, easily supporting queries beyond 20 TB.
A majority of SolanaFM’s functionality is built using GraphQL which allows you to explore, build, and manipulate the data as you want.
Using SolanaFM enables you to:
- Query dApps on the network
- Query the health of Solana’s network (TPS, block production, active accounts).
- Building charts & analytics
- Query raw information of dApps within Solana ranging from DeFi to NFTs for analysis or research.
- SolanaFM is built with the functionality of GraphQL, which gives developers building with the platform the ability to write custom queries to fetch DEX Trade data from different decentralized exchanges operating on Solana.
3. Alchemy
Alchemy is a blockchain infrastructure provider that serves as a platform layer for web3 applications. You can think of it as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) of the internet.
It recently added support for Solana and you can now create API keys for easy integration into your applications. Developers can interact with on-chain data, send transactions, and deploy contracts on Solana by leveraging Alchemy’s API endpoints. The API follows a JSON-RPC standard, which is a lightweight, remote procedure call (RPC) protocol that is commonly used when interacting with blockchain data.
The API endpoints query data from the Solana blockchain on network information, and retrieves block information, account information, node, transaction, and token information.
4. ChainStack
Chainstack is solving the user experience problems faced in the blockchain industry. The platform is dedicated to enabling developers to build, run, and scale blockchain applications.
Over time, the platform has now grown into the only enterprise-grade blockchain-managed services platform that enables innovators to deploy, manage, and scale DApps in minutes.
Chainstack also has a powerful infrastructure optimized for the Solana blockchain, its Solana RPC nodes, powered by Chainstack Cloud can scale seamlessly without any network disruptions while maintaining over 99.9% uptime. You can also get access to Solana archive nodes to query the entire mainnet history of the network, to which one can write queries to filter and fetch DEX trading data.
The RPC node can be adjusted to fit into any application workload as it comes with;
- Different hardware options
- Mainnet, Devnet, and Testnet support
- Dedicated node resources for higher performance
5. Moralis
Moralis is a web3 development platform that offers everything a user needs to create, launch and grow great decentralized applications in one place. Moralis indexes all core aspects of blockchain data and provides access to this through a suite of data-focussed API endpoints.
With the Moralis Solana API, you can:
- Fetch NFT metadata
- Fetch wallet portfolios
- Fetch token balances by wallet
- Monitor user wallet activity
- Fetch SPL token prices
6. BlockDaemon
Blockdaemon is a leading blockchain infrastructure platform that empowers businesses to quickly deploy and iterate innovative blockchain applications. Blockdaemon offers institutional-grade Solana infrastructure, on-chain data, and staking services.
Its universal multi-chain API allows users to tap into full archive data across blockchain networks
You can also utilize the RPC Native API, which can easily interact with multiple major protocols through their own native APIs. The RPC API allows you to go deeper into a specific blockchain and get enriched native-specific data.
Blockdaemon’s API Suite provides access to REST and RPC historical data for Solana.
With Blockdaemon REST API, you can access the supported Solana method types which include the following:
- Protocols
- Accounts
- Blocks
- Transactions
- Transaction Broadcasting
7. GetBlock
GetBlock is a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform that provides instant API access to full nodes from multiple blockchains.
The platform supports SON-RPC, REST, WebSocket and GraphQL APIs with over 50+ blockchains support. Its Solana API allows for transaction analysis, account information and network state evaluations.
GetBlock has partnered with Covalent to provide a unified API for accessing detailed blockchain transaction data across multiple networks without the need for coding. Users can sign up for an API key on the Covalent platform and access API documentation for detailed information on supported networks and endpoints. The API supports real-time and batch data refresh rates, and users can switch between blockchain networks using the chain_id parameter. Covalent’s API unlocks various use cases such as multi-chain wallets, NFT dashboards, tax compliance tools, DEX analytics, and DAO governance.
How do you choose the Right API provider for Solana DEX Data?
When selecting a provider, several key factors should be considered to ensure it aligns with your project’s requirements and goals:
- Uptime and Reliability: Check the API’s reliability and uptime to ensure consistent availability and performance.
- Functionality: Ensure the API offers the necessary functionality for your use case, such as trading data, liquidity pool information, user balances, and historical data.
- Documentation: Look for comprehensive documentation with clear examples, tutorials, and explanations to facilitate integration and development.
- Rate Limits: Consider the API’s rate limits, request quotas, and throttling policies to ensure they meet your application’s needs.
- Security: Ensure the API implements robust authentication, encryption, and data protection mechanisms to safeguard sensitive information and transactions.
- Community and Support: Look for an active community, documentation feedback, support channels, and developer resources.
- Cost: Consider the pricing model, costs, and any associated fees for accessing the API.
- Scalability: Evaluate the API’s scalability to handle increasing volumes of requests and data.
- Compatibility: Ensure the API is compatible with your development environment, programming languages, and tools.
- Updates and Maintenance: Consider how frequently the API is updated, maintained, and supported by the provider.
