Compare · CoinGlass
CoinGlass alternative for Bitcoin reserve data
CoinGlass publishes Bitcoin exchange balances per wallet address, which most metrics vendors do not. It also caches them for an hour and rounds them.
We measured its plans, its documented precision and its Bitcoin gaps on 10 September 2026.
REST API · SQL · dashboards · address history since the 2009 genesis block
BTC
Balance trail
informational on-chain data · not financial advice
CoinGlass leads on derivatives data and cross-exchange dashboards, while BitcoinDatabase gives you the raw Bitcoin chain at satoshi precision so you can rebuild and audit an exchange balance figure yourself instead of subscribing to a rounded hourly snapshot.
Side by side
CoinGlass vs BitcoinDatabase, honestly
A fair look at what each does well. Both are capable tools. Here is where they differ.
| What matters | BitcoinDatabase | CoinGlass |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | No free plan | No free plan either: paid API keys start at $29 a month |
| Entry price for the balance endpoints | Usage-based paid plans, listed on our pricing page | Hobbyist $29/mo, then $79, $299, $699, Enterprise on request |
| Rate limit at entry tier | Plan-based, published on our pricing page | 30 requests per minute on Hobbyist, 1,200 on Professional |
| Exchange balance freshness | Per block, as the chain confirms | Cached one hour on every plan, Enterprise included |
| Balance precision | Satoshi, eight decimal places | Documented response carries two decimal places |
| Per-address exchange holdings | Any address, live, with the transactions behind it | Yes, the Exchange Assets endpoint returns wallet_address and balance |
| Bitcoin on-chain transfer records | Every input and output on the chain | Exchange on-chain transfers endpoint is ERC-20 only |
| Large transfer coverage | Any amount, full history | Whale Transfer covers Bitcoin at $10M minimum, six months back, not on Hobbyist |
| Derivatives data | Not offered | Open interest, funding, liquidations and long/short ratios across exchanges |
| Asset coverage | Bitcoin only, by design | Many assets and many exchanges |
| Raw chain access | Blocks, transactions, inputs, outputs and the UTXO set over REST and SQL | Aggregated market and balance series, not the chain underneath |
| Public documentation | REST and SQL reference on /docs | Strong: 177 documented endpoints, an llms.txt, and Markdown for any page |
| Best suited for | Teams that must reconcile or audit a Bitcoin balance figure | Traders and desks watching derivatives positioning and exchange flows |
Comparison reflects general, publicly understood positioning. Capabilities change, so check each product for the latest.
Why teams pick BitcoinDatabase
The fully indexed Bitcoin blockchain, queryable by REST, SQL and dashboards
What CoinGlass costs, and the free tier that is not there
We read the pricing page on 10 September 2026. There are five API plans: Hobbyist at $29 a month with 30 requests per minute, Startup at $79 with 80, Standard at $299 with 300, Professional at $699 with 1,200, and Enterprise on request. Annual billing knocks off roughly 12 to 20 percent depending on the tier. There is no free API plan, which surprises people who have used the free web dashboards for years. We confirmed the gate directly: calling the exchange balance endpoint with no key returned the body {"code":"401","msg":"API key missing."}. Note the shape of that refusal, because it matters if you are writing the client. The HTTP status on that response was 200, not 401. A naive integration that only checks the transport status and calls raise_for_status will sail straight past an authentication failure and start parsing an error object as data. Check the code field in the body.
The balance data is hourly and rounded, on every plan
This is the limit that decides whether CoinGlass fits your use case, and it is documented plainly rather than hidden. Both the Exchange Balance List and Exchange Assets endpoints state a cache and update frequency of every one hour for all API plans. Paying for Enterprise does not buy you a fresher number. The Bitcoin Reserve Risk endpoint updates once a day and is not available on Hobbyist. Whale Transfer is real time but starts at Startup, only surfaces transfers of $10 million or more, and only reaches back six months. If you are watching positioning across exchanges, hourly is fine and the rounding is irrelevant. If you are reconciling a ledger, proving a period-end balance to an auditor, or trying to tell a zero-satoshi move from a small one, hourly aggregates cannot do that job at any price.
Their documentation example uses two addresses we have been reading for a month
The Exchange Assets reference shows a response containing 34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHoCNxv4Twseo at 248,597.54 BTC and 3M219KR5vEneNb47ewrPfWyb5jQ2DjxRP6 at 139,456.08 BTC. Those are two of the five cold addresses we have now read nine times since 16 August 2026. Our reading on 10 September 2026, at block 966,451 and cross-checked against two independent explorers, put the first at 248,597.59248616 BTC and the second at 219,059.94207766 BTC. The first figure is remarkably close, which tells you that address genuinely sits still. The second is 79,603.86 BTC apart, because that address has grown a great deal since the documentation example was written and a static sample in a reference page is not a live reading. That is not a criticism of CoinGlass, it is a reminder about what a documentation example is. The real point is the decimals: their documented field carries two, ours carries eight.
Why two decimal places is the whole argument
On 10 September 2026 we read the same five exchange cold addresses for the ninth time and got 69,460,003,430,648 satoshis, which is byte-for-byte the number we recorded on 4, 6 and 8 September. Four consecutive readings, identical to the satoshi. In the 287 blocks before this reading, the off-list hot wallet that funds that set confirmed 1,677 transactions moving 58,861.16 BTC of gross flow, and the tracked total did not move by one satoshi. At two decimal places you cannot see any of that. A rounded figure cannot distinguish an unchanged balance from one that drifted by half a million satoshis, and at recent prices each address carries up to about 875 dollars of rounding error before you even start. For a chart that is noise. For a reconciliation, an attestation, or a proof-of-reserves check, it is the entire question. We work through the method on the <a href="/lp/bitcoin-exchange-reserves">Bitcoin exchange reserves</a> page, including the full nine-reading series.
Good questions
CoinGlass vs BitcoinDatabase, answered
Explore the data
The Bitcoin data you can query here
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Query the whole Bitcoin blockchain in one place
An address in, structured on-chain data out. BitcoinDatabase serves balances, UTXOs, transactions, entity labels and fund flows, with address history back to the 2009 genesis block over REST, and SQL and dashboards over the indexed chain. No node to run.
REST + SQL + dashboards · new blocks within seconds · informational on-chain data only