Exchange API

Overview

An exchange API provides programmatic access to market data, balances, orders, trades, deposits, withdrawals, and account functions offered by an exchange. An exchange API lets software interact with a trading venue or asset-conversion service without using its graphical interface. Order types, precision, fees, symbols, rate limits, finality, and withdrawal rules must be read from the specific provider contract. High-value systems should design for provider outage and ambiguous responses. Data handled by Exchange API should use documented types, units, timestamp rules, nullable fields, and enum behavior to prevent silent interpretation errors.

Clients should use scoped keys, IP restrictions where available, encrypted secret storage, request signing, idempotent transfer references, and clock synchronization. Reconciliation must compare local intent with fills, fees, balances, and withdrawals. Public methods commonly expose markets and prices, while authenticated methods can manage accounts, orders, transfers, and transaction history. A successful order submission means acceptance, not necessarily execution at the expected price. A successful transport result from Exchange API should not be interpreted beyond the exact API state documented by the provider. The Exchange API owner should publish stable error semantics and guidance on whether correction, retry, status lookup, or escalation is appropriate.

Changes to Exchange API should be checked against older clients, stored payloads, enum growth, default behavior, and retry assumptions.

Observability for Exchange API should record operation, version, principal, request ID, latency, retry count, error code, and final state without exposing secrets.

Testing Exchange API should cover malformed input, denied access, rate limits, timeouts, duplicates, asynchronous completion, and version changes.