Where the Bitcoin price comes from

The five exchanges

Each price is the last trade price of the BTC/USD market on the exchange, in US dollars.

How the average is made

The average is the mean of the last trade prices of the exchanges that answer, rounded to the cent. Each exchange has the same weight. An exchange that does not answer is left out until it answers again.

Our server reads the five prices every 5 seconds. The apps, the price alerts, and the free API use these prices.

The live price page does not wait for our server. Your browser connects to the public trade feeds of the exchanges and shows each trade. An exchange that has not traded for 90 seconds leaves the average until it trades again. So the web page and the app can differ by a few dollars for a moment.

The prices on the exchanges are different because each exchange has its own order book. See the live spread between them.

Price history

Our server keeps the 5-second prices for the short ranges, and 5-minute, hourly, and daily summaries for the longer ranges. The charts from 10 minutes to all time use these tables.

The daily history before our own collection comes from the daily candles of each exchange. Bitstamp has daily candles from August 2011, so the long history of the average uses Bitstamp. The other exchanges join the average on the date that their own data starts. When an exchange returns no candles for a period, the backfill uses CoinGecko candles.

The Market Signal has a daily score from 2013, because each score needs two years of prices before it.

How often each number updates

The Market Signal

The Market Signal is our own 0 to 100 score of Bitcoin momentum, trend, and volume. It uses only the price and volume data on this page, with no third-party sentiment index. Three price inputs set the direction, and two volume inputs make the move stronger or weaker. Read how the score works.

Limits

• The prices are BTC/USD only. Other currencies and other coins are not included.
• An exchange can stop its feed or change its prices. The average then uses the other exchanges.
• The daily close is at 00:00 UTC.
• The Market Signal and the research pages describe market conditions and history. They are not investment advice.

Find an error? Send it to support@bitcoin-price.app.