Market Data For 8000 Cryptocurrencies, At Your Fingertips
Introducing geckor, an R package to query the CoinGecko API
Motivation
With the recent boom and crash of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies have attracted lots of attention from the general public, retail and institutional investors, researchers, and regulatory bodies. Despite all the controversies, the very idea of cryptocurrency as a digital asset and medium of exchange with no centralised control over it is certainly here to stay and shape the future of finance. Being able to monitor, understand, and predict the development of cryptocurrency markets will therefore become increasingly more important. This, in turn, will require good data and experts, who know how to make sense of that data.
CoinGecko is one of the providers of high-quality cryptocurrency data. The company offers programmatic access to their data via a public REST API. Client libraries to interact with the CoinGecko API have been developed for a variety of popular programming languages. However, no such libraries have so far been created for R, despite the popularity of this language among Data Scientists. This article introduces geckor, an R package that aims to fill this gap and make the rich data offered by CoinGecko easily accessible to the global community of R users.
