Since the introduction of the cryptocurrency — Bitcoin in 2009, the entire market of cryptocurrency has prospected and continues to flourish. To date, there are over 4,000 altcoins (alternative cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoins) have been created. Besides, cryptocurrency is notorious for its volatility. It could be very difficult to keep an eye on the market, especially for novice investors.
How Web Scraping Matters in Cryptocurrency Trading
Web scraping is predominantly used in e-commerce and sales for price monitoring and lead generation. Nowadays, more investors start to leverage tech in online financials. It automates the process of data extraction from multiple sources and stores data in a structured format for further analysis.
In the following parts, we’ll break down the steps and show you how to overcome investment obstacles using web scraping. The first one is extracting historical crypto market data for a comprehensive market analysis. And the other one is monitoring the crypto pricing to have a clear picture of the whole market cap like a pro trader.
There are many ways you can use to extract data. You can write scripts or choose a web scraping tool to automate the process. Here we introduce Octoparse as an easy web scraping tool, that asks for nothing about coding. With its intuitive interface, you can scrape cryptocurrency data with points and clicks. It also provides ready-to-use web scraping templates to extract data from various websites. It has a scraping pipeline and integrates the data into a database or with cloud APIs for Enterprises of all sizes. For users who want a lighter volume of data, the basic version is completely free to use. If you are looking for a one-stop data solution, Octoparse also provides web data service. Or you can simply follow the Octoparse user guide to scrape website data easily for free.
Steps to Extract Cryptocurrency Data with Octoparse
I want to invest Bitcoin but don’t know if it is the right time. I am going to extract Bitcoin Market Data from Jan 2019 till now so I can see the market trend and decide whether I should invest or not. In this case, go to CoinMarketCap page and set up a time range. Then, open Octoparse after you have downloaded and installed it successfully.
Step 1: Copy and paste the target URL to the Octoparse main panel, and you’ll enter the auto-detecting mode by default.
Step 2: Create a workflow and customize the data fields. Follow the Action Tip and select all the fields including Open, High, Low, Close, Volume, and Market Cap.
Step 3: Start scraping by clicking on the Run button. The scraped data can be downloaded as Excel to your local device.
You should be able to get the whole chart like this: Bitcoin Market in 2019.
Scrape Cryptocurrency Data with the Octoparse Preset Template
Octoparse is an easy-to-use solution for anyone to build scrapers themselves. However, if you’re looking for an easier and more effective way to grab data, Octoparse preset templates can be the best choice. Octoparse simplifies the web scraping process by designing a variety of preset scrapers that cover most mainstream platforms nowadays. When you scrape cryptocurrency data with the template CoinMarketCap Scraper, you can just get up-to-date price data without creating a workflow or entering any parameters.
https://www.octoparse.com/template/coinmarketcap-scraper
Extracted Cryptocurrency Data Analysis
Now we have the data in Excel. We can graph it with Excel Waterfall chart.
As you can see the market follows a clear pattern in which the price rises, drops off, and stabilizes. A price pump will be followed by a consolidated period. And, a sharp rise will soon follow a sharp dropping off. It makes sense because when the market is too volatile it needs to cool down to a stabilized level. The market since June has had higher volatility. The consolidated window gets shorter and shorter, and prices rise and drop rapidly compared to that at the beginning of the year. In most cases, the higher the volatility, the riskier the investment. At the end of the chart, it indicates the price fluctuates with an upward trend without any sign of getting stabilized. It clearly shows that it’s not the best time of the year to invest in Bitcoin.
Price Monitoring for Cryptocurrency Market
Since the market price fluctuates, for both spectators and investors, it is necessary to keep an eye on the market. Web scraping can monitor the price change and deliver to your database for later access. So whenever the prices hit a certain point, you can take action in time.
Set up a new project with https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/. I am going to select each coin name to extract the price data. Octoparse finds all similar elements by selecting all listing names. I click the “TR” command from the Action Table to tell Octoparse to extract rows instead of columns.
Then I follow the Action Tip and click “Select All Sub-element” to define extraction fields from the same row. Octoparse will select all data fields in the same pattern. I then follow the guide on the Action Tip and click “Select All” command to confirm the selection. The selected field will turn green if it has been successfully selected.
Then Click “Extract Data in the loop” to extract the data. Now we have all the data including the Market Cap, Price, Circulating Supply, Volume, and changes within 1h, 24h, and 7 days.
From the Dashboard, I set the extraction schedule at 30-minute intervals. As a result, my database gets updated every 30 minutes. I can set my hands off the table while still monitoring the market.
Here is a step-by-step video guide tutorial you can learn about Octoparse web scraping on cryptocurrency data.
What Else Web Scraping Can Help with Cryptocurrency Analysis
1. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis measures people’s opinions through natural language processing. The idea is to monitor the public mood about the market from social media since the network is the main portal for most cryptocurrency investors to express the market sentiment. Guus argued that “A change in the market sentiment would be associated with a change in the value of the market index.” (Guss, 2017) Moreover, Kaminski (2014) also pointed out that the data collected from Twitter shows a significant correlation between the sentiment and the closing price, trading volume and intraday price.
2. News Aggregator
For managerial professionals, look out the news media to catch up with the latest bitcoin trading information is the daily basis. Web scraping is able to collect news information from various platforms and send it to your email so you can save your time from searching. You can read more details about Build a News Aggregator.
