· 4 min read · Feb 14, 2024
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Recently at Rakurai, we’ve been exploring different APIs for Ethereum and its L2s for an application that could help us track portfolios of high performing wallets. The goal was to provide the critical details like traded token, historical prices, transaction details and PnL. While doing so, we came across a number of different offerings. In this post, I’ve listed the pros and cons of a few platforms to help identify which suits best for similar DeFi use cases.
Moralis is a one-stop shop where you have access to all the APIs required to build a DeFi application. It has support for a Token API where you can access data for Ethereum and its L2s. It also provides a wallet and NFT API to fetch transaction history. Their documentation is quite comprehensive and easy to understand. One downside is that if you want to fetch price history from Moralis, you need to call a subsequent API by block number for each wallet transaction. This adds a lot of overhead where there are a large number of transactions. Also their free API request limits are a little strict to start off with.
Etherscan is the go-to solution when it comes to fetching information related to Ethereum. It has all the on chain information that you need related to the transactions and tokens. Even though documentation is a bit hard to follow, it still offers a more focused set of APIs with very flexible rate limits even on free plans. Unfortunately, same as Moralis, etherscan doesn’t provide historical prices from the get-go in the historical transactions of a wallet. It requires a subsequent API call under the paid plan, to fetch historical ethereum price and then convert it into desired currency.
Syve is also a very good option mainly focusing on offering APIs to fetch information related to wallet history. It has very good documentation for quick enablement and relatively relaxed rate limits on free plans to start off with. On top of the basic wallet information, it has PnL built on top of it and provides APIs, both on the portfolio level of a wallet and also its categorization per token which makes it stand out from the crowd. While it does give you a head start, it’s still in the development and improvements stage. Some of the APIs can be a little buggy at times and there might be a case where it doesn’t support all the tokens on a chain.
Zerion is another platform in this domain. It has support for Ethereum and multiple L2s, and its API is quite flexible in that it allows you to fetch transactions with pricing denominated in ETH, BTC or a fiat currency of your choice. It has the most relaxed rate limits on the free plan as compared to the rest. The best thing about Zerion is that it offers historical prices of a token at the exact point of the transaction in transaction history making it easier to build PnL. Even though there can be certain API responses where you’re unable to find the historical price, it’s still more robust and convenient to use. Zerion also provides PnL for wallets as part of their paid subscription for dashboards.
