What is the Kucoin API and what is it used for
If you are a new user to Kucoin, you may have seen the “Kucoin API” option on the exchange and been curious. When reading the official documentation, you may not have understood anything.
That’s why we are creating this article to help you understand what the Kucoin API is in a simple way.
What is an API?
First of all, you need to know what an API is. An API is for you to make quick and simple communications with some system.
For example, imagine your friend has created a cool program on his computer about nutrition, where the user enters some basic body information like weight and height and the program returns a diet suggestion.
This program could be put on a website, where several users around the world could use it.
But imagine that you have data from an entire class of students in an Excel file, and you don’t want to have to enter all the data manually on the website. The ideal solution would be to be able to automate this task, where you just submit all the data at once and the nutritional program returns all the results.
This would be possible through an API.
In other words, an API is an automated way to communicate with some software. You, who are going to use the API, want to create some simple programming code (like organizing the data in your Excel file and then submitting it to the nutrition site), and the site needs to be ready to receive these requests.
To make this possible, some programming language will be used, such as Python.
With Python, you use a visual interface (IDE), which you are used to writing your programs, and import a specific library that contains all the parameters to work with the API in question.
In the case of our nutrition program example, you would use some simple command in your code like:
import nutritionAPI
and then start using the API. Each time you run the code, this API would communicate with the server that owns the nutrition program.
If the API was well constructed, the commands would be as simple as:
diets = nutritionAPI(data)
that is, you would pass the students’ data and the function would return the diets, saving the result in the “diets” variable we created.
Back to the Kucoin API
Now that we understand what an API is, it’s easy to understand what the Kucoin API is. It is an automated way to communicate with the Kucoin cryptocurrency exchange.
Instead of manually logging into the exchange and performing your commands to make a trade, you can program everything using Python.
Why is this useful?
Imagine you want to create a trader bot that buys and sells bitcoin every time the price of two moving averages cross.
Simply create programming code using Python that defines when it is time to buy or sell (by calculating the moving averages) and execute the orders on the exchange using the API.
The Kucoin API returns various information, such as the price of the assets, so you can follow the price in real time, perform the calculations, and submit the orders to the exchange to make the trade.
How to use it in practice?
I mentioned in the example of the nutrition program that it would be necessary to import a library with the API in question. In the case of Kucoin, this is the Python library: https://github.com/Kucoin/kucoin-python-sdk
In this same Github repository there are code examples showing how to make the requests and what results are returned.
Kucoin also allows its API to be used with other programming languages besides Python, such as Java, PHP, GO and Nodejs.
Did you enjoy the article? Also read: