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This article covers the methodology of how DIA gets and calculates prices for cryptocurrency assets. |
Cryptocurrency assets are mainly traded on centralised and decentralised exchange markets (CEX and DEX). Centralized markets generally require traders to open accounts, transfer their assets to a centralised wallet belonging to the exchange and then trading on the off-chain trading engine belonging to the exchange. Only when an asset is transferred from the exchange to another wallet, a change of ownership can be recorded on-chain.
In contrast, DEXes operate entirely on-chain and assets are exchanged directly from wallet to wallet. While this gets rid of the requirement for accounts and trust in the exchange itself, it also restratins the tradable assets to ones that are accessible to the on-chain component representing the DEX (usually a smart contract). Also, on-chain transaction costs can be higher than in an off-chain system due to gas usage.
Thus, conversion between assets from incompatible blockchains is restricted to centralized exchanges, as well as conversion between crypto and fiat assets.
The vast majority of recorded trades by DIA are between two crypto assets. Only a minority of trades against fiat currencies is recorded on CEXes. Nontheless, DIA reports all asset prices in USD, even for numerous assets where only crypto-crypto pairs exist.
To retrieve a USD price for each and every asset, DIA uses a price estimator. The price estimator is updated with every recorded trade. Each trade consists of a base token and a quote token. The price of a quote token is measured in base tokens. Because the order in a trade of base token and quote token is arbitrary, USD is always considered as base token. Other fiat currencies are also always base tokens, except when measuring the ECB exchange rates. An asset needs to be a quote token in at least one market for us to be able to determine a USD price.
After a trade is recorded, it is fed into the price estimator. The estimator determines the current value of the base token measured in USD (by a chain of trades ending at a fiat pair). From there, the price estimator determines the price of the quote token and stores it, should the quote token become a base token in a later trade.
This price estimation process needs to be robust against trades with prices that are diverting from the current market price of an asset pair.
Detecting and excluding outliers and market manipulation is an important data processing task, especially in small and (somewhat) intransparent markets. Otherwise, a single low-volume trade can offset the price estimation and serve as a base token for other assets, leading to a chain reaction of misaligned price data.
We calculate our cryptocurrency spot-prices using 120-second moving average (SMA) with a weighting of trade volumes. Small volume trades have a proportionally smaller influence on the determined price than bigger volume trades . In order to create reliable pricing, we also exclude data points and sets entirely that lie outside of an acceptable range relative to the interquartile range of all data points.