Comment by TheSheriff on "Looking for feedback on a universal crypto API"

The tax manager would be cool/useful. How many countries does it currently account for, tax wise? It would be useful but there are many places that already offer aggregated crypto API stuff.

Are you additionally offering the ability to make trades through your platform? Whether that be transfers or buy/sell offers?
If this is true then what about offering FIX API methods? I can imagine a lot of actual traders just building their own stuff due FIX > SSL. Especially considering FIX doesn't have the issues associated with nonce errors that are really common with standard SSL requests. Another note on trading: if your users actually want to make trades on stuff it will be extremely important that your servers have the best latency possible.

NB:
If you're offering this globally then you HAVE to be aware of GDPR in Europe. tl;dr You have to provide a way for users to request all the details you have on them and the ability to delete it.

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

The tax manager currently only supports US. Not a technology issue but because tax laws vary a lot between countries, so it is just bandwidth to cover different cases.

As for the APIs, the big advantage is that I don't store any user identifiable info. 100% agree about the visibility of information stored. Trading is an interesting case - but it does open up different challenges. Latency as you mentioned. Additionally, trust and various policy also.

Thanks again.

So, currently, users wouldn't be able to make trades? Only view the price of crypto currencies? If so then it wouldn't store users details anyway.

Trading - no. But it shouldn't be hard to add - but it is a policy issue vs tech. And it'll never be as fast as trading on the exchange itself due to the extra layer.

Think of the current Path. API as a 'ledger of ledgers'. A view of trades/assets across all exchanges and wallets. There are many possible use cases - like the tax manager or a more advanced 'coin tracker' type app.

There are no user identifiable info at the API level - just a hash that ties things together in the path system. There is no way (at the user level) I'll know who that data belongs to. The app (like path.tax) that sits on top of the platform, handles any user identifiable info (if they choose to do so).

It wouldn't be terribly difficult to add. But it would require alot of work if you want to do it well, especially if you want to use FIX API as well.

Oh, I think I see now, your platform is a tl;dr/aggregation of all historical trades, transfers and assets?

As for keeping track of assets I believe this will be slightly more difficult, as anyone with any sense would keep them in a cold offline storage wallet or even a paper wallet. So maybe add a feature to allow manual addition of assets.

"aggregation of all historical trades, transfers and assets" - yep, you got it.

It will include manual input too - as you mentioned. The goal is actually to automate as much as possible.

Sounds pretty cool then. There are many different ways you could monitise it too. You could sell licenses to the platform so that trading companies could use them. If you do this well, these trading companies will probs make offers to buy it from you. Especially if you provide analytics (tiered of course) on how well trades have been going over certain periods based on historical trade data.

The ability to upload trade data for analysis could be cool too.

And perhaps an RSS feed or something so that users can keep up to date with news and how that news affects the current assets they hold.

Sorry, letting my mind run away a little here. You will need to provide tutorials for setting up keys for access on each exchange (if required) though, even if you don't keep a copy of them on record.

Yes - a lot of possibilities. Path.Tax is just an example of apps that can be built on the platform.

API docs coming very soon. If you join the waitlist, I'll notify users once it is ready.

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