Web Scraping Crypto Prices With Python

This is the most beautiful soup

Tommy Chan
6 min readJul 1, 2020
Illustrated by Bryan Feng (Author)

Recently I was looking for some data from a website to do my own analysis on cryptocurrencies. I believe there’s probably going to be a large bull run coming soon and I wanted to do my own analysis to capture gainz when the time comes.

As always, if you want to do good analysis, you need good data. For cryptocurrencies, look no further than CoinMarketCap.

You don’t always need APIs

Traditionally we’d like to use an API to fetch data, but we all know that APIs are designed with limitations for the free user. The free plan of most APIs are just there to tease you enough for you to pull out your wallet and spend money on a paid plan. Personally, I’m cheap so I’m looking to stay in the free realm.

What I first did was go through CoinMarketCap’s website and look for their API and pricing plans to see if the free plan could get the job done.

This is what I see:

ಥ_ಥ

In comes the Soup

The free API is not going to give us what we want but don’t fret, we’re going to…

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Tommy Chan

Writing about technology, business, and work culture. Subscribe to my Web3 newsletter at https://stillbuilding.substack.com/