API Performance
Happy New Year! We took a week off last week for the Christmas/New Year holiday, but now we are back at the grindstone with our weekly Fintech API ratings. For our Fintech API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular Fintech API ratings category with our patented CASC score.
Something of interest
CryptoCompare props up the Cryptocurrency Exchanges Fintech API category table this week. 
It has a 100% pass rate, but has a lot of outliers and is very slow with a median latency of 1189 ms, more than twice as slow as the next slowest (HitBTC at 528 ms). 
CryptoCompare is obviously hosted in Europe. It’s horribly slow from anywhere else in the world. We can’t say too often that you need to understand what your users are experiencing. Your API might be perfectly fine for you exercising an endpoint from the same country the server is located in. But we live in a globalized world now. Your users might be on another continent. They don’t want 2000 ms of additional latency. 
There is no single rate-determining component. DNS Lookup Time is essentially fine, but Handshake Time and Download Time both show how much faster Europe is that other regions, especially East Asia and Oceania. 
It would definitely be worth CryptoCompare having a look to see if they can do something to optimize performance across all regions. For instance, slow Download Time might be a product of transferring a large payload between continents or it could just be a slow connection. There might well be things that could be done.
Fintech API Ratings: Overall Performance
Week Ending 4 January 2021
Category
Organization
CASC score
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
RadarRelay
9.31
Fintech
Stripe