# BlackForge

> BlackForge is a crypto market data API: raw order-book and trade measurements, not trade calls. It streams live order-book and trade data from nine spot venues, every pair, and publishes 120 measurement columns per pair: for humans on a dashboard, and for autonomous agents that pay per call over the x402 protocol. The whole crypto market, in real time.

BlackForge is a crypto market-data API operated from Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain. Website: https://blackforge.so/. It is currently in private beta: access is gated and granted by request via the waitlist at https://blackforge.so/#request-access.

## What it does

- Streams order books and trades from nine spot venues in real time: Binance, Bybit, OKX, Coinbase, Kraken, KuCoin, Bitget, Gate and MEXC.
- Spot markets only. Derivatives, perpetuals and futures are not covered.
- Every pair on those venues is covered, nothing filtered out, long tail included. About 11,800 pairs report in a typical closed 5-minute window; the exact count drifts daily with venue listings and delistings.
- New pairs across those venues are tracked from their first trade.
- Publishes 120 measurement columns per pair: 80 market-microstructure metrics (candle, volume, trade flow, large-trade counts, order-book depth bands and ladders, book churn, trade timing), 18 enrichment metrics (market cap, rank, liquidity, AI visibility, CoinGecko trending rank, GitHub commits, contributors and stars, 24h news count, 24h video count, sentiment, watchlist users), 9 market-context columns (BTC and ETH reference prices, two fear-and-greed indices, Binance and Coinbase app ranks with their regions, crypto news per hour), plus keys and quality columns.
- Every row also carries a quality bitmask. Nothing is hidden, filtered or nulled. Values are exactly as measured, and the mask tells you which of them to trust. On the dashboard the same flag is drawn on the line itself: wherever the mark is fainter or hollow, that bucket is flagged; solid means final.
- History is kept forever. Retention is infinite; the history window on each plan is an entitlement, not a deletion policy.
- Ingest is streaming WebSocket, tick by tick. The published value is a 5-minute bar per pair, so every column is at most five minutes old.

## Two ways to consume the data

- For humans: a live dashboard that filters the market by exchange, pair or metric, plus webhooks and streams. The dashboard is in private beta; request access at https://blackforge.so/#request-access.
- For agents (x402): point an agent at a single endpoint. x402 is HTTP 402 Payment Required, put to work: the agent requests data, receives a price over HTTP, settles a stablecoin micropayment on-chain, and receives the data in the same round trip.

## The x402 pay-per-call model

- Endpoint shape (private beta, not yet publicly resolvable): `GET https://api.blackforge.so/v1/markets/{pair}` (for example `/v1/markets/SOL-USDT`).
- Price: $0.005 (USD) per call, up to 100 rows per call, paid per request.
- History: pay-per-call reaches the last 90 days. The full archive is subscription-only.
- Settlement: USDC micropayments on the Base network.
- Once generally available, agents need no account, API key, subscription or onboarding.
- Round trip is typically well under a second including on-chain settlement.

## Developer surfaces (MCP, CLI, agent skill)

The same market data is available over three developer access rails, on every plan including Free. All of them read the same v1 API and obey the same per-key entitlements: one key, one meter.

- MCP server: an official Model Context Protocol server that exposes the nine venues, roughly 11,800 pairs and up to 120 measurement columns as MCP tools for AI agents. Install with `npx -y @blackforge-so/mcp`. Discovery is free.
- CLI: a command-line client for scriptable pulls to CSV, JSON or a table. Snapshot a venue, a pair or the whole book from your terminal or a pipeline. Install with `npx -y @blackforge-so/cli`.
- Agent skill: an agent-agnostic BlackForge skill that answers plain-language market-data questions (depth, spreads, volume for any pair on any venue), powered by the MCP server. Install with `npx skills add blackforge-so/skill`.

## Plans

History windows below are plan entitlements: how far back a plan may read. The archive itself is never deleted. CSV export, the CLI and the agent skill are on every plan, Free included; what scales with the plan is the agent's usage allowance, anchored on Pro.

- Free, $0: Binance, MEXC and Gate, daily granularity, a 2-week history window, 39 columns per pair, 1M rows per month, CSV export, 1 seat, a taste of the agent.
- Pro, $29/month or $290/year: all nine venues, hourly granularity, a 3-month history window, 73 columns per pair, 10M rows per month, CSV export, 1 seat, the agent included.
- Max, $99/month or $990/year: all nine venues, native 5-minute granularity, a 1-year history window, all 120 columns per pair, 50M rows per month, CSV and Parquet export, 3 seats, 5x Pro's agent usage.
- Ultra, $399/month or $3,990/year: everything in Max plus the full archive, at production scale: 500M rows per month, daily S3/Azure Blob delivery, snapshot endpoint, 10 seats, 20x Pro's agent usage.
- Pay as you go (x402), $0.005 per call, up to 100 rows per call, all 120 columns, a 90-day history window, USDC on Base, no account or API key required.

While BlackForge is in private beta, every plan starts with an access request at https://blackforge.so/#request-access.

## Who it is for

- Quant and discretionary crypto traders who want the full market, at 5-minute resolution, in one feed.
- Developers building trading systems that need one API for humans and agents.
- Autonomous AI agents that need machine-payable, per-call access to real-time crypto market data without human onboarding.

## Important

BlackForge provides market data and measurements, not investment advice or a recommendation to trade. Crypto markets are volatile; users trade at their own risk.

## Key pages

- Home: https://blackforge.so/
- Metric reference (every measurement, by family, with units and plan): https://blackforge.so/metrics
- Pricing, machine-readable: https://blackforge.so/pricing.md
- Comparisons (BlackForge vs the alternatives): https://blackforge.so/compare
- Glossary (order-book and trade-flow terms): https://blackforge.so/glossary
- Privacy policy: https://blackforge.so/privacy
- Terms of service (includes the "not financial advice" disclaimer): https://blackforge.so/terms
- Cookie policy: https://blackforge.so/cookies

## Contact

- Email: hello@blackforge.so