Cryptocurrency arrived at the global stage not too long ago but has already become one of most sought after technologies already. With a future of promising growth ahead, agencies are looking to get their hands into the blockchain market any way they can. Cryptocurrency trading and exchange are highly data dependent. Having the data of past prices and factors affecting the costs in future can go a long way in figuring out which cryptocurrency to invest in, which transaction to be a part of and much more.
The need for this data has paved the way for Web Scraping to get involved. With the help of scrapers, the cryptocurrency data can be collected and structurally stored and updated in real-time to provide the traders with a reliable basis to make their decisions.
What is Cryptocurrency?
Ever since the arrival of Blockchains in the form of Bitcoin in 2009, a new tech-revolution has been on the rise, similar to what the open-source software or social networking or maybe even the internet itself caused. From cryptocurrencies to contracts to transactions, Blockchain has been consistently transforming into a more efficient, trusted and secure way to share information between open and private networks. Although the applications of blockchains are vast and continuously being explored, its best application till date is still considered to be the one in the form of which it arrived in the first place: Cryptocurrencies.
Based on a decentralized and peer to peer network, Cryptocurrencies remove the need of the presence of any third-party institution to govern the currency. Currently for a transaction to happen between a US citizen and a UK citizen, government and banks will be needed to involve for conversion of pounds to dollars or vice-versa. Cryptocurrency removes this need of banks or government and numerous people across the globe can have a direct transaction between them in the form of crypto coins.
Source: giottus
How do Cryptocurrency exchange and trading help?
Cryptocurrency comes with a hoard of advantages:
No Fraud: Cryptocurrency is a digital currency, like credit cards. This means that it cannot be counterfeited or reversed arbitrarily by the sender.
No Third Party Involved: Since it is based on the blockchain, trust between parties is established directly, and there is no need for any third party to get involved in any kind of transaction. Contracts can be designed and enforced directly to reach a settlement. Using cryptocurrency, complete trust can be established between two strangers directly.
Identity Security and Safety: Unlike credit-cards, cryptocurrency trading and exchanges utilises asymmetric cryptography to provide privacy and security to the buyer as well as the seller. One cannot steal someone else’s identity or copy them unless and until they have access to the private key which is hidden and protected.
Decentralization and Global Access: There is no centre party managing the trading and transactions alone. The database or the ‘blockchain’ is distributed throughout the globe, in its network and no one person has complete control over it. People can access the blockchain for trading and mining from anywhere in the world and be completely assured of the safety of their data exchange.
How does Web Scraping help traders and buyers?
While traders are realizing the rising opportunities in cryptocurrency investing, there is still a lack of a reliable trading platform. When it comes to crypto trading, the trader himself has to conduct risk analysis and assess market opportunities.
This is where web scraping comes to the rescue. Crawling for diverse cryptocurrency data can enable a trader to keep track of changing trends and assess market forces.
1. Monitoring Cryptocurrency Prices
Web scraping helps the traders to be up-to-date with the prices of various cryptocurrencies in the market. This helps in preventing a lot of time that would go into manually checking the latest prices and remain updated with any number of cryptocurrency prices in real time.
2. Analysis of future states of cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrency is one of the most booming industries, with the prices varying significantly on a daily basis. In such a scenario, investing the right amount of money at the right time on the right currency becomes extremely important for the traders and buyers alike. With the aid of web scraping, we can collect data across the internet and perform precision analysis to identify the factors that affect the cryptocurrency prices and use this data to predict cost analysis and market behaviour. This would help the traders to predict the right time to get involved with a certain cryptocurrency at the point of the probability of highest returns.
Numerous factors could affect the cryptocurrency prices that vary from Political like South Korea’s announcement of the closure of cryptocurrency trading; Technological like developments in the usage of specific currency will increase its demand, like IBM’s crypto banking solution; Economical like the bankruptcy of trading companies and Media and Societal norms.
By collecting data from sources that could help us keep track in development of these factors could help in the prediction of most likely market behaviour. For, eg. If the cryptocurrency trading is being stopped in a particular area or country, it will most likely result in the downfall of the exchanges. Similarly, if a technical solution system is developed, that utilizes cryptocurrency like Banking or Election Voting, the probability of the growth increase in trading of that particular currency increases, making it a good bet to invest in it right now. Such data can easily tell us which cryptocurrency would be the best to trade and in which period.
Bitcoin and Web Scraping
Bitcoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies being used today for trading and mining. Slowly and steadily, Bitcoin has crawled into the online finances and e-commerce market, with a number of online stores like Overstock and eGifter accepting it as the mode of payment.
For such companies, to offer Bitcoin acceptance functionality, scraping Bitcoin data is an essential activity. Web scraping is a crucial activity for e-commerce companies in general; providing them with data obtained from multiple sources and structurally collected at one place to be analyzed further. Bitcoin companies are similar to all the other e-commerce companies and similarly rely on web scraping, with the only difference being the kind and utility of the data being collected.
Although bitcoin is still some time away from being directly accepted across different e-commerce companies directly, listings for off-site transactions is being incorporated popularly by multiple websites.
With a promising future, cryptocurrency has so far been nothing less than a revolution in the payments system. Traders, buyers, sellers, whoever it may be, everyone depends on data in one way or other to make their decisions of exchange. With web scraping, this data could be available at a click in a structured format along with analyzed results to study and get to a conclusion.
To help you get such data, Datahut provides automated scrapers that would deliver it to you with minimal human involvement. Contact us to know more!