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Get historic crypto currency market data from CoinGecko

Source: R/cg_history.R
cg_history.Rd

Companion to crypto_history() but for CoinGecko. Returns daily OHLC, volume, and market-cap timeseries in a tibble whose column names match the crypto2 CMC output.

Usage

cg_history(
  coin_list = NULL,
  convert = "USD",
  limit = NULL,
  start_date = NULL,
  end_date = NULL,
  interval = NULL,
  requestLimit = 400,
  sleep = 0,
  wait = 60,
  finalWait = FALSE,
  single_id = TRUE,
  date_convention = c("end_of_day", "raw")
)

Arguments

coin_list

string if NULL retrieve all currently existing coins (cg_list()), or provide list of crypto currencies in the cg_list() / cg_listings() format.

convert

(default: "USD"). Any CoinGecko quote currency, e.g. "BTC", "ETH" or "EUR".

limit

integer Return the top n records, default is all tokens.

start_date, end_date

date Filter the returned timeseries to this date window after fetching.

interval

string Always coerced to "daily" – CoinGecko website endpoints return daily granularity for full-history pulls. Hourly is not available without an API key.

requestLimit

Kept for parity with crypto_history() – ignored (CoinGecko returns full history per coin in one call).

sleep

integer (default 0) Seconds to sleep between API requests. The internal client enforces a polite floor to stay within CoinGecko's per-minute budget.

wait

waiting time before retry in case of fail (default 60).

finalWait

Sleep 60s after the last call (mirrors crypto_history()).

single_id

Kept for parity with crypto_history() – ignored; CoinGecko endpoints are always single-coin per call.

date_convention

Either "end_of_day" (the default) or "raw". CoinGecko's native daily series timestamps each point at 00:00:00 UTC of date X, which is the same physical instant as 23:59:59 UTC of date X-1 – i.e. CG labels it as the start-of-day rather than the close-of-day. CMC (and crypto_history()) label that instant as date X-1 (the day that just ended), which is also the standard asset-pricing convention used by CRSP/Compustat and major academic datasets. With "end_of_day" (default) cg_history() shifts CG's midnight ticks by -1 day so close[X] / close[X-1] - 1 is the return earned during date X, matching CMC. Pass "raw" to keep CG's native start-of-day labelling.

Value

Crypto currency historic OHLC market data in a tibble:

id

CoinGecko internal numeric id (NA if unknown).

slug, name, symbol

Coin identifiers.

timestamp

POSIXct (UTC), midnight of the trading day.

ref_cur_id

Quote currency code (e.g. "usd").

ref_cur_name

Upper-cased quote currency.

open, high, low

Daily OHLC from 4-hour candles (last 30 days).

close

Daily close from the price series; back-filled from the OHLC candles where the price series has no value.

volume

Daily total volume.

market_cap

Daily market cap.

time_open, time_high, time_low, time_close

NA – CoinGecko does not expose intra-day OHLC timestamps in these endpoints.

Details

No API key is required. When the requested coin's numeric id is missing in coin_list, cg_id_mapping() is consulted to fill the id column.

All data come from CoinGecko's website chart endpoints; no API and no key are used. Coverage:

  • Close, volume and market cap for the full lifetime of each coin, in any quote currency. In USD they come from CoinGecko's daily CSV export (one request per coin), otherwise from the website's chart data (two requests per coin).

  • OHLC (open / high / low) is built from 4-hour candles (one extra request per coin) and covers the most recent 30 days; older rows have NA there. Longer windows are only offered as 4-day candles, which are not daily bars. For a one-shot complete OHLC backfill see vignette("coingecko-pro-backfill").

Only completed days are returned. If no close/volume/market-cap series can be retrieved for any requested coin, the function stops with an error (the source has most likely changed); if it fails for some coins only, a warning names them.

Fallback (opt-in). With options(crypto2.cg_api_fallback = TRUE), coins the website cannot serve are fetched from CoinGecko's public API instead, still without a key. Its daily history covers only the last 365 days, so this is off by default: a call that falls back warns and lists the affected coins in attr(result, "cg_api_fallback").

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Top 50 by market cap, full available history
top50 <- cg_list()[1:50, ]
hist  <- cg_history(top50)

# Bitcoin only, last year
btc <- cg_history(cg_list()[1, ],
                  start_date = Sys.Date() - 365,
                  end_date   = Sys.Date())
} # }