I'm working on a new R package called rockchain for blockchain and cryptocurrency market data analysis. The link takes you to the package documentation. There is an introduction vignette as well, though it only introduces a few simple things at this time. The package is in very early in development.
Other R packages exists for working with various blockchain APIs or certain pieces of cryptocurrency data of interest, but they tend to be fairly specific in application. I'm looking to makerockchain more general than what I have seen out there for R, taking a broader approach and giving the package a little bit of everything under the hood, if possible, though it will probably take some time.
Currently rockchain can only be used to access the following:
- ticker / market cap data via either the
coinmarketcap.comAPI for all tracked currencies there, Bitcoin and altcoins, or via theblockchain.infoAPI for Bitcoin only. - Bitcoin wallet transaction data via the
blockchain.infoAPI.
I've struggled a bit with the latter. While I have working code, unfortunately just in the process of throwing that code together I think I made requests to the API for wallet data a few too many times and now the same code does not get through most of the time. In fact, it eventually became so impossible to get through to the API that I actually had to disable all the unit tests in my package that are associated with wallet-related functions just in order to ensure a passing build. That's a bummer, and a real problem. Anyhow, for now the coinmarketcap.com side of things, while also still very basic, is the more interesting aspect of rockchain.
Time permitting, I plan to add access to other blockchain APIs, more interesting data, stock visualizations, web apps, etc. If anyone has any suggestions for easy APIs to check out, please let me know. For context, I am mostly interested in sites that do not require the user to have an API key to access data by easy URI endpoints. This is because a much larger number of R users will be likely to use the package to interface with blockchain data of interest for statistical analysis if they can just use the package "out of the box" and don't have to apply for or configuring their own API keys from various sites.
Anyhow, let me know what you think. Suggestions are welcome, especially regarding what APIs would be most interesting to include for R users; what would be the low-hanging fruit implementations that would yield the most immediate rewards for relatively little dev time (this is all done on my limited personal time).