Crypto Top-of-Book Streams
In addition to Chainlink's standard liquidity-weighted crypto price streams, Data Streams offers Top-of-Book streams for perpetual futures markets. These are sourced directly from a single centralized exchange's public order book, rather than aggregated across venues.
Top-of-Book
Top-of-Book streams report the best bid and best ask currently resting on a specific exchange's order book for a given instrument. These streams are useful for protocols that need to reflect a specific venue's live order book conditions, such as perpetual futures for tokenized equities and commodities (RWA perps) traded on Binance and Hyperliquid.
Data sources
| Exchange | Public channel | Fields consumed |
|---|---|---|
| Binance | <symbol>@bookTicker (Individual Symbol Book Ticker Stream) | b (best bid price), a (best ask price) |
| Hyperliquid | l2Book | Best bid/ask px from levels[0]/levels[1] |
Additional exchanges may be added over time as new streams are onboarded.
Schema
Top-of-Book streams use the RWA Advanced (v11) schema:
| Schema field | Populated from |
|---|---|
bid | Exchange's best bid price |
bidVolume | Size at the best bid, when provided by the exchange |
ask | Exchange's best ask price |
askVolume | Size at the best ask, when provided by the exchange |
mid | Calculated by the Chainlink DON — not provided by the exchange |
marketStatus | Reflects the venue's availability. Crypto perpetual markets generally trade continuously; see Market Status Values for how this maps for a specific feed. |
Data freshness and update frequency
Top-of-Book streams are event-driven: a new observation is only published when the underlying exchange emits a new datapoint on its public channel. There is no fixed polling interval.
End-to-end latency from the underlying exchange to node operators is sub-second under normal conditions. Actual latency can vary based on network conditions and exchange-side publishing behavior.
Risk considerations
- Single-source dependency: Each Top-of-Book feed is sourced from one exchange. If that exchange stops publishing updates, there is no automatic fallback to another venue for that feed.
- Venue-specific pricing: Top-of-Book reflects one exchange's order book, which can diverge from prices on other venues, especially during periods of low liquidity or high volatility on the source exchange.
- Review Developer Responsibilities before integrating Top-of-Book streams into a production application.