We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters
— Peter Thiel
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with technological promises thrown at you from all directions. Quantum computers, nuclear fusion, hoverboards, Mars colonies, and now blockchain. How close are they to having a product? How feasible? Are they just a VC money-extraction-tool? There’s often no easy way to evaluate a truly innovative thing before it gets built, no matter how many experts read the whitepaper. There is, however, a way to ground project research in concepts we are all familiar with. No matter how innovative the vehicle you are building, there are a few fundamentals that you need to get right to achieve your goals. If someone raises horses and talks about reaching the Moon, it will probably take that company some time before take off. With this in mind, we propose to have a look at the state of technology for one of the burgeoning areas of crypto-finance: data providers. Although the metrics we chose are arguable, the generational differences in chosen technologies can help distinguish the chariot from the spaceship.
Infrastructure
| Maturity | Tech Stack | Company |
|---|---|---|
  | Mainframes Self-hosted MySQL | ICE Anchor Digital |
  | Co-location hardware Virtual servers Oracle ActiveMQ | Digital Asset Data Nomics Cointelligence TradeBlock |
  | IaaS Containers Microservices CI/CD NoSQL RabbitMQ Kafka | Flipside Crypto Coinigy Thomson Reuters XIGNITE Kaiko Coin Metrics Santiment Messari CyptoCompare CoinMarketCap |
  | Infrastructure as code Container orchestration Multi-cloud Serverless Big Data Frameworks Service mesh | Inca Digital Chainalysis CoinAPI |
Codebase
| Maturity | Tech Stack | Company |
|---|---|---|
| PHP Cobol Perl | Cointelligence Anchor Digital |
| Python Node.js C# Ruby R | Flipside Crypto ICE Digital Asset Data Nomics XIGNITE Coin Metrics CoinAPI CyptoCompare TradeBlock CoinMarket Cap Kaiko |
| C++ Java | Inca Digital Chainalysis Coinigy Thomson Reuters Messari Santiment |
| Golang Rust Erlang |
Security
| Maturity | Tech Stack | Company |
|---|---|---|
| Antivirus Tape over webcam | Digital Asset Data Nomics Coin Metrics XIGNITE Cointelligence CoinAPI Messari Santiment CyptoCompare TradeBlock CoinMarket Cap Anchor Digital Kaiko |
| Dedicated software and hardware Log Management CISSP | Flipside Crypto ICE Coinigy Thomson Reuters |
| IDS Centralized governance SSO Secret Managers | Chainalysis |
| SIEM DLP Dedicated security personnel | Inca Digital |
Delivery
| Maturity | Tech Stack | Company |
|---|---|---|
| Email Excel FTP | ICE Thomson Reuters Cointelligence |
| Web platform REST | Flipside Crypto Chainalysis Digital Asset Data Nomics Coin Metrics XIGNITE Messari Santiment CyptoCompare TradeBlock CoinMarket Cap Anchor Digital |
| Websocket Cloud API | Inca Digital Coinigy CoinAPI Kaiko |
| Multi-site sync Cloud Marketplace |
Overview
| Maturity | Company |
|---|---|
| ICE Cointelligence Anchor Digital |
| Flipside Crypto Thomson Reuters Digital Asset Data Nomics Kaiko Coin Metrics XIGNITE Messari Santiment CyptoCompare TradeBlock CoinMarketCap |
| Chainalysis Coinigy CoinAPI |
| Inca Digital |