The Need for Trusted Monero Street Price APIs

A free, unbiased, data-based monero street price API is essential for the xmr economy. Using prices reported from APIs like CoinGecko - who in turn get their data from the exchanges - introduces several trust points into the system: we trust CoinGecko to not manipulate the data and we trust the exchanges to not provide manipulated data. While there is no panacea against price manipulation (wash trading can still happen on DEXs), removing trusted third parties from the price API ecosystem and only trusing raw DEX data is a good place to start.

This is why I started working on a street price API that will use two DEXs: Haveno and Bisq as data sources. I also intend to have a "price deviation metric" to show if the coingecko price has deviated from the street price. This would allow arbitragers to take advantage of the situation, which would then push the prices back together.

News

2024-10-14

The operator of haveno.markets got in touch and shared contact info and the site's source code. He/she stayed anonymous but also mentioned that a json api was in the works. This domain, xmrprice.fyi, will probably become a mirror.

2024-10-10

The reason I stalled out on this week-old project is that there is already a great project, haveno.markets, which alledges to source its data from Havena Reto. I say "alledges" because the project is closed source (or at least I can't find the source) and the hostmaster is anonymous. According to Rottenwheel, even the Haveno Reto operators don't know who maintains haveno.markets.

I am sure the operator is anonymous with the best intentions, however, without open-sourcing the project, there is no way to verify that no funny-business is happening on the backend. Haveno.markets can not be trusted by the community until the source is public. Also, without open-sourcing the project, nobody can create mirrors. When one price api goes down, it can break many implementations. With multiple mirrors, secondary and tertiary price sources could be queried instead.

Do you operate haveno.markets? You are welcome to stay pseudoanonymous but please open source the project and start accepting contributions from the community (like me). Two updates I can think of right away are to include a json api and to source data from bisq too.

Please contact me at www.ki9.us/contact if you know anything about haveno.markets or its operator. If I don't hear back after a week or two, I will have to assume haveno.markets is untrustworthy until proven trustworthy and I will proceed with my own API project.