Head to head · Exchange market data · October 2026 research run

Bitfinex API vs Hyperliquid

Bitfinex API scores 58.4 (C) on agent readiness against Hyperliquid's 50 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Hyperliquid leads on agent ergonomics and payments & pricing. Both do exchange market data.

Best crypto exchange APIs and MCP servers for AI agents · All 210 exchanges comparisons

Which one, for what

Bitfinex API C

Best for An agent trading spot, margin or derivatives, or lending on the funding market, with scoped keys, official clients and paper trading.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 85 against 40
  • Schema & documentation, 48 against 42
  • Transparency & trust, 49 against 26

Watch for

No official MCP server, OpenAPI file or AsyncAPI file; the registry's Bitfinex servers are third parties proxying public market data

Hyperliquid D

Best for An agent trading perpetuals or spot on chain from its own wallet with no account, or acting for a master account through an approved API wallet.

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 70 against 61
  • Payments & pricing, 55 against 40

Watch for

No official MCP server; the 23 registry entries are all third parties, several selling data by x402

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reliability Bitfinex API +45

Bitfinex API 85

Read with the hosted lines on the v2 API at api.bitfinex.com. bitfinex.statuspage.io is a Statuspage site with history back to May 2021 (20). Its feed has no entry between 25 March 2026 and 3 November 2026, so the last 90 days are clean on the record; the feed logs platform-wide outages only (a 14-hour maintenance in March 2026, a 3-hour outage in August 2025), so smaller incidents may go unrecorded. Judgement call (30). Rate limits with numbers, 10 to 90 a minute per IP and the WebSocket connection limits (15). ERR_RATE_LIMIT and the 60-second block are documented, with no Retry-After; orders take a cid but no idempotency key or retry guidance was found (10 of 15). No SLA found (0). Generally available (10). 20 + 30 + 15 + 10 + 0 + 10 = 85.

Hyperliquid 40

Read with the hosted lines on the REST API at api.hyperliquid.xyz, the surface an agent calls; the chain behind it is noted under details. No status page found in the docs, on hyperliquid.xyz or at status.hyperliquid.xyz, which did not resolve (0). No readable history (5). Rate limits documented with numbers per IP, per address and per WebSocket connection (15). When limited, an address gets one request every 10 seconds; no 429 shape or Retry-After is documented, but cloid, per-signer nonces, expiresAfter and noop make retries safe (10 of 15). No SLA (0). Mainnet is generally available (10). 0 + 5 + 15 + 10 + 0 + 10 = 40.

Transparency & trust Bitfinex API +23

Bitfinex API 49

The editorial half. A closed service whose Exchange Terms and API Terms of Service loaded only navigation, so the licence terms are unknown; the clients are MIT and Apache-2.0 (8 of 30). The privacy statement loaded only navigation, so retention and data handling are unchecked (0 of 30). The docs say v1 will be deprecated "at some point in the future" with no date, and the Python client's 4.0.0 removed endpoints with a release note (5 of 20). Subprocessors and data locations are in the unread privacy statement (0). 8 + 0 + 5 + 0 = 13.

Hyperliquid 26

The editorial half. The SDKs are MIT and the node repository Apache-2.0 with a Dockerfile around a binary; the API servers and front end are closed and the terms were unreadable (12 of 30). No privacy policy read and nothing in the docs on data handling (0 of 30). Deprecated actions are marked in the docs without dates or a policy (8 of 20). No subprocessors or data locations (0 of 20). Total 20.

Payments & pricing Hyperliquid +15

Bitfinex API 40

No machine payment protocol (0). The fees page is public without login (20), though it shows zero maker and taker with no tiers or date. The API is free, public endpoints need no account, and paper trading needs no money (20). A person must sign up in a browser with identity checks and mint the key (0). 0 + 20 + 20 + 0 = 40.

Hyperliquid 55

No machine payment protocol (0). Fees published per tier without login (20). No card anywhere; public info endpoints are free and the testnet faucet gives 1,000 mock USDC, though only to an address that has deposited on mainnet (15 of 20). No signup; an agent with a funded EVM wallet deposits USDC on a bridged chain and trades, subject to the unread terms (20). Total 55.

Agent ergonomics Hyperliquid +9

Bitfinex API 61

Graded on the REST API. Limits on trades, candles and book depth, and pub:list config endpoints keep responses small, but positional arrays make every field a lookup (14 of 25). start, end, limit and sort on history endpoints and per-symbol variants (16 of 20). ERR_RATE_LIMIT is actionable; authenticated 400s return {} and withdrawal status strings may change, so an agent cannot branch on causes (8 of 20). A client id on orders, order multi-op and cancel-multiple, but no idempotency key and no retry contract (8 of 20). Few required parameters and official clients in Node, Python, Go and Ruby (15). 14 + 16 + 8 + 8 + 15 = 61.

Hyperliquid 70

An API, read for response sizing. Time-range calls return at most 500 blocks of data, fills and historical orders cap at 2,000 items, candles at 5,000, l2Book at 20 levels a side (18 of 25). Cursor-by-timestamp pagination on fills and funding, filtering by coin or dex, no field selection (14 of 20). Order errors are documented strings per order, one batch-level error rejects a batch, and orderStatus answers unknownOid; no codes and no rate-limit error shape (12 of 20). cloid, per-signer nonces within a time window, expiresAfter, noop to burn a nonce and scheduleCancel as a dead man's switch (18 of 20). Few required fields, but signing needs msgpack field order, two EIP-712 schemes and lowercase addresses, and the official SDKs are Python (Alpha) and Rust only (8 of 15). Total 70.

Schema & documentation Bitfinex API +6

Bitfinex API 48

No OpenAPI or AsyncAPI file was found on docs.bitfinex.com, in llms.txt or in the client repositories (0). llms.txt and a .md twin of every docs page (10). Each reference page states the endpoint's purpose and fields, and the introduction says when to use api-pub against api, but nothing says when not to use an endpoint (14 of 20). Responses are positional arrays described in field tables, inputs are typed in prose with some enumerations (wallet names, order types) and required fields marked; the withdrawal CODE field is work in progress (7 of 15). Signed-request recipes in five languages, but authenticated errors are documented as 400 with an empty object and there is no error reference (9 of 15). Version v2 in the path and a dated changelog, whose last entry is October 2024 and whose v1 deprecation has no date (8 of 15). 0 + 10 + 14 + 7 + 9 + 8 = 48.

Hyperliquid 42

No OpenAPI or other machine-readable contract; request and response shapes are tables and JSON examples in the docs (0 of 25). llms.txt and a Markdown twin of every page by appending .md (10). Each info type and exchange action has a short description of what it does, and the signing page lists common mistakes, but little says when to use one call over another (12 of 20). Fields are one-letter keys (a, b, p, s, r, t, c) with numbers as strings, enums such as tif Alo, Ioc or Gtc, and required fields marked in tables (9 of 15). An example for every call and a list of order and cancel error strings, with no HTTP error table (11 of 15). No API version, no changelog and no dated release notes; deprecated actions such as userDexAbstraction are marked in place (0 of 15). Total 42.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBitfinex APIHyperliquidEdge
Reliability16%208540Bitfinex API +45
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.24842Bitfinex API +6
Agent ergonomics13%16.26170Hyperliquid +9
Security & auth14%17.56264Hyperliquid +2
Payments & pricing10%12.54055Hyperliquid +15
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.84139Bitfinex API +2
Transparency & trust7%8.84926Bitfinex API +23
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 58.4/100D 50/100

Facts side by side

FactBitfinex APIHyperliquid
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendoriFinex Inc.Hyperliquid Labs
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per usePay per use
x402nono
LicenceProprietary hosted API under Bitfinex's API Terms of Service, which our reader couldn't load. The official client libraries (Node, Python, Go, Ruby) are MIT or Apache-2.0The exchange runs on the Hyperliquid chain (HyperCore), whose node is distributed as a binary under an Apache-2.0 repository; the Python and Rust SDKs are MIT. The API servers and front end are closed
Tools exposednone0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-07-182026-06-04
Terms last updatedcouldn't be readcouldn't be read
Privacy policy last updatedcouldn't be readno document linked
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be readcouldn't be read
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be readcouldn't be read
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be readcouldn't be read
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be readcouldn't be read
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be readcouldn't be read
Popularity480 stars1.9k stars, 167k PyPI/wk

Verdicts

Bitfinex API

Bitfinex gives an agent scoped keys with a separate withdraw permission, paper-trading sub-accounts on the production API, llms.txt and official clients in four languages. There is no official MCP server, responses are positional arrays with empty error bodies, rate limits run 10 to 90 a minute per IP, and the terms, API terms and privacy statement could not be read.

Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid's API needs no signup or key, an approved API wallet can trade but not withdraw, fees and rate limits are published with numbers, and a testnet mirrors mainnet. There is no official MCP server, OpenAPI file, status page, changelog or readable terms, and signing uses two schemes the docs say to leave to an SDK.

Before you call either

Bitfinex API

  1. Mint a key with read on the scopes the task needs and write only on orders; never grant withdraw to a trading key, and bind the key to known IPs
  2. Use one key per client process, since each key keeps its own strictly increasing nonce and a reused nonce is rejected
  3. Rehearse on a paper-trading sub-account with the TEST symbols before touching real balances; the sub-account cannot be converted later
  4. Plan requests against the per-endpoint limit of 10 to 90 a minute per IP; ERR_RATE_LIMIT blocks the IP for 60 seconds with no Retry-After
  5. Map each response by position from the docs' field tables and set a cid on orders, because responses are arrays and a 400 carries no reason

Hyperliquid

  1. Generate a fresh API wallet, approve it with approveAgent with a name and expiry, sign with it, and query with the master address, never the agent address
  2. Use the Python SDK's sign_l1_action and sign_user_signed_action; mixing the two, field order in msgpack or an uppercase address gives "User or API Wallet ... does not exist"
  3. Set a cloid on every order and read the per-order statuses array; one batch-level error rejects the whole batch
  4. Budget address limits by volume (one action per 1 USDC traded after 10,000); batch orders to lower IP weight, and use WebSocket for data
  5. Arm scheduleCancel before unattended trading so open orders are cancelled if the agent stops

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Bitfinex API or Hyperliquid?

Bitfinex API scores 58.4 (C) on agent readiness against Hyperliquid's 50 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Hyperliquid leads on agent ergonomics and payments & pricing.

Do Bitfinex API and Hyperliquid need an API key?

Bitfinex API needs an API key. Hyperliquid takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Bitfinex API and Hyperliquid without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Bitfinex API. No hosted endpoint is listed for Hyperliquid.

Other comparisons with Bitfinex API or Hyperliquid

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