Exchange overview - Kraken Developers

Kraken’s Exchange APIs give you programmatic access to two separate trading engines — Spot and Derivatives — each with its own endpoints, rate limits, and authentication flows.

Markets

	Spot	Derivatives
Markets	700+ crypto pairs	Perpetuals and dated contracts on BTC, ETH, and more
Order types	Limit, market, stop, take-profit, trailing stop, IOC, post-only	Limit, market, stop, take-profit, IOC
Base URL (REST)	`https://api.kraken.com`	`https://futures.kraken.com`
WebSocket	`wss://ws.kraken.com/v2`	`wss://futures.kraken.com/ws/v1`
Sandbox	UAT available on request via Account Manager	`https://demo-futures.kraken.com` (self-service)

Protocols

All three protocols are available for both Spot and Derivatives, but with different capabilities on each engine.

Protocol	Best for
REST	Account operations, funding, one-off queries
WebSocket	Real-time market data, order management, and balance updates
FIX 4.4	Institutional and HFT — deterministic sequencing, cancel-on-disconnect, colocation

See Choose your protocol for a full feature matrix, latency comparison, and guidance on which protocol to use.

Workflows

Workflow	What you need	Where to start
Market data	Public endpoints — no API key needed	REST `GET /0/public/*` or WebSocket public channels
Algorithmic trading	Private order endpoints + real-time execution data	REST or WebSocket v2 `executions` channel
Market making	Low-latency order entry, live book, cancel-on-disconnect	WebSocket v2 or FIX
Account management	Balances, ledger, funding	REST private endpoints
HFT	Deterministic sequencing, colocation, FIX replay	FIX 4.4 or WebSocket (Spot); REST or WebSocket (Derivatives)
Sub-accounts	Multi-account management	REST `CreateSubaccount`, FIX Tags 78/79
Earn	Allocate/deallocate to staking products	REST Earn endpoints

Feature matrix

Feature	Spot REST	Spot WebSocket	Spot FIX	Derivatives REST	Derivatives WebSocket	Derivatives FIX
Market data	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Order entry	✅	✅	✅	✅	—	✅
Account data	✅	✅	—	✅	✅	—
Funding	✅	—	—	✅	—	—
Earn	✅	—	—	—	—	—
Subaccounts	✅	—	—	✅	—	—

Performance and hosting

For latency-sensitive strategies, Kraken offers connectivity options from AWS London (~2 ms) to direct colocation at Equinix London (~200 μs). See Colocation and connectivity for the full breakdown.

Getting started

Choose your protocol

Detailed comparison of REST, WebSocket, and FIX for each market

API key permissions

Understand which permissions to enable for your use case

Authentication

Nonce management and HMAC-SHA512 signature generation

Order lifecycle

How order states and transitions work across all protocols

Error reference

Common errors and how to fix them

Rate limits

How rate limits work across REST, WebSocket, and FIX

​Markets

​Protocols

​Workflows

​Feature matrix

​Performance and hosting

​Getting started