will the data feed be event-based (tick), and will millisecond timestamp be supported?
Quoting FIX homepage, The Financial Information eXchange ("FIX") Protocol is a series of messaging specifications for the electronic communication of trade-related messages. It has been developed through the collaboration of banks, broker-dealers, exchanges, industry utilities and associations, institutional investors, and information technology providers from around the world.
So yes, the protocol is realtime, event-based, and supports millisecond precision for timestamps.
Electronic trading in fiat has been there since 1970s, but Bitcoin exchanges are not that mature. We cannot provide a true realtime feed with millisecond timestamps if exchange API don't provide these data to us.
For most exchanges (in fact all but MtGox) we collect data by polling their public REST API every 15 seconds. We will push events to the clients as we get data from polling. So our service is a mere translation of proprietary protocols into an interoperable industry-standard protocol.
You won't get better realtime than with public exchange APIs, but better interoperability with existing financial software and data unification between exchanges.
Of course as exchanges collaborate with us to provide better raw feeds or publish better APIs our consolidated standard feed will improve too.
What will be the monthly price for:
- realtime only
- history + real-time?
We don't really know yet. FIX feed is a niche product for professional traders and institutions. We expect only a few subscribers. The demand for data is lower than for visualization, so the price will probably be higher.
