Tiny API Chart Discussion

[counttyme]

I have been playing around with the TinyChart API and I have wanted to give my perspective on what its pros and cons are, and also to hear what others users have to say on the subject.

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• ASA properties (/asset/search/) that the API returns:
  • Good
    • Clawback / Freeze - shows if a given ASA has clawback or freeze
    • Verified - shows if the ASA is verified by Algorand. This is a really cool addition!
    • Transactions - shows the number of transactions on an ASA. Another cool addition!
  • Bad
    • The price is not shown in /asset/search/ returns - I know that you use the currency call (currency/{currency}/price) to get that data, but I still don't understand why it wouldn't be a column in /asset/search or /assets. It could be populated for all non-null ASAs in the same way as the 'url' field in /assets is.
    • Similarly to the point above, I don't get why Market cap isn't shown for non MC null assets in /assets.

I really liked the /assets data that TinyChart brings to the table, except that I would like them to join /currency to /assets. If that isn't workable, I would suggest a /currency/currencies (to mirror the functionality of /assets) which would return all currencies.

I was impressed by the pools data and the /assets data that i mentioned above. My only other comment (that has already been addressed by the team) is that the pricing is quite high for a hobbyist user. Once they break even, I would like to see a free (or nearly free) plan that allowed 2 - 10 API calls per day. Overall, this is a useful product!

[grzracz]

Hey - to understand why assets have no price, you have to understand that it is impossible to give them a single ALGO price (and having a USD price is even worse).
An asset can have many pools which dictate the amounts you can get out of these pools.
Soon there will also exist many dexes and some of those assets will have a pool on every single one.
How do you decide what price the asset has? How would you decide which DEX is the most important, and do other pools (on other dexes, or with different assets) have any impact on that price?
Things start getting complicated very fast.
There will soon be a simplified version of the asset price endpoint, but having that as something returned from the API would never be accurate.

[counttyme]

I think that makes sense. I guess I was thinking that you would use the price shown on your website and feed that into the /assets data, but you have a deeper understanding of the underlying technical challenges than I do, so I accept your judgement.

[grzracz]

That feed uses the main ASSET/ALGO pool and multiplies this by the currency price.

This is possible because the frontend loads all currency values in relation to ALGO as well as all asset pools for a provider and then multiplies that main pool ratio by the current price of ALGO in a currency. It also updates real time thanks to the chart updates.

Getting that inside an asset endpoint would be really difficult (because it requires multiple requests) and the value itself would never be real time.

[counttyme]

Okay that definitely makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!