Tiingo Thoughts

We’re excited to announce that Tiingo has launched our own Chainlink node live on mainnet, bringing our financial market data directly to blockchain markets. Our initial journey will start with providing cryptographically signed end-of-day equities price data directly on-chain, with several DeFi applications already set to consume it. This enables a whole host of new DeFi markets to exist, specifically built around U.S. equities, such as perpetual derivatives contracts, synthetic assets, rebasing tokens, and more.

Being the most widely used oracle solution in the market, Chainlink was the clear choice in blockchain middleware necessary to get our existing API’s blockchain enabled across all the leading networks. Not only does the Chainlink node allow us to sell our API data directly to various blockchain applications, but we can sign our data on-chain to prove its origin as being from Tiingo, further adding to its reliability when settling DeFi contracts. Additionally, the node setup process was very easy and seamless, requiring minimal technical effort to get our API data exposed to a much wider range of markets. 

For more information on why we opted to use Chainlink to monetize our data for blockchain markets, check our previous announcement. To learn about how to access our node, visit https://docs.chain.link/docs/tiingo-eod-stock-price-oracle.

In addition to end of day equities prices, we have a multitude of premium data sets that can be made available on-chain through our Chainlink node to service the increasing DeFi demand. This includes over 70,000+ global securities (Stocks, ETFs, and Funds), 4,100+ crypto trading pairs, and 130+ FX tickers. For a deeper look into how Tiingo provides the highest quality data with a highly available API, refer to https://api.tiingo.com/.

“We’re thrilled to launch our own Chainlink node live on mainnet, providing us with a universal gateway to start supplying premium financial data to the fast growing DeFi industry. This allows us to facilitate the launch of new DeFi markets, applications, and products, starting first with support for on-chain U.S. equities markets via signed EOD equities prices directly from our API. We envision this is only the beginning of our long and fruitful expansion into DeFi through the Chainlink Network.” — Rishi Singh, CEO of Tiingo

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universally connected smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.

Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.

Docs | Discord | Reddit | YouTube | Telegram | Events | GitHub | Price Feeds | DeFi | VRF

About Tiingo

Tiingo is an award-winning financial analytics and data platform that powers thousands of asset managers, technology firms, and individuals across the globe. Unique in its position as both a consumer of its data and distributor, Tiingo is trusted by firms across the industry for its clean and unique datasets, which are engineered for the discovery of new alpha sources. With a mission deeply rooted in democratizing access to financial analytics and data, Tiingo is also a leader in financial education for future generations, having partnered with research departments at universities across the world to advocate for financial markets literacy. 

Formed in 2014, Tiingo holds that belief that love is the ideal way to conduct business. We are a team made up of artists, engineers, and algorithmic hedge fund traders. Some of us have been professional photographers, and others have created trading algos managing hundreds of millions of dollars. We are united with the same goal: to make everyone’s life easier in the ways we know how. 

To learn more about Tiingo’s APIs visit https://api.tiingo.com and to learn more about the Tiingo analytics engine, visit https://www.tiingo.com.

Tiingo is excited to announce that we will be bringing our premium API data to leading blockchain networks via the launch of our own official Chainlink oracle node! As part of the market-leading Chainlink Network, which connects blockchain applications (built using smart contracts) to external data APIs, we will be able get our entire suite of APIs blockchain-enabled, allowing us to supply smart contract developers with a wide variety of financial datasets used to trigger their execution. 

Given the emergence of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), an ecosystem of financial applications and products built on blockchains, we see a great opportunity to make our data available across the DeFi market via our Chainlink oracle node. Through the Tiingo Chainlink oracle node, we can broadcast our API data directly onto any blockchain platform, as well as sign that data on-chain through a unique cryptographic signature to prove its origin as being from Tiingo. Not only will this grow our reach as a data provider into new blockchain-based markets, but our data can expand the types of DeFi applications that can be built, ultimately empowering us to directly support and participate in the provisioning of a completely new and parallel financial system.

Our initial focus will be providing on-chain data regarding the closing prices of equities, before then moving our attention to developing FX feeds. This will enable DeFi developers to build on-chain financial products such as derivatives based on traditional equities, further widening the types of financial exposure users can get within DeFi markets.

Establishing Tiingo as a Top Oracle Node and DeFi Data Provider

Tiingo consists of a data research and analytics arm, a news aggregator, and a professional suite of APIs. Our API provides over 1,253,400,491 data points and counting, including price tickers for over 70,000+ global securities (stocks, ETFs, and Mutual Funds), 4,100+ crypto tickers, and 40+ FX tickers. We also have over 30 million financially tagged news articles (Equities, Funds, Crypto, and FX), and provide fundamental data on stocks and ETFs, which include 106 Indicators, 20+ Years of Fundamental History, Quarterly and Annual Data, and Restatements and As-Reported Numbers.

Our stock price API in particular is made up of at least 3 data sources on average for each price feed, protecting users against downtime and erroneous data points. We’ve implemented a proprietary data cleaning framework that allows us to quickly monitor any erroneous points and apply fixes, accompanied by a full audit trail to reproduce the price series. Our prices are also highly precise as we don’t round to only include a few decimal places, and our uptime is high, with optimized in-memory caching, and proprietary disk caching so we can deliver data quickly and consistently.

With a wide selection of high-quality market data, we are ready to begin our journey into the blockchain markets by supplying it directly to smart contract developers and applications, where it can be used to execute key on-chain functions like settling a derivatives contract, triggering automated on-chain trading strategies, calculating fine-tuned loan rates based on historical data, and more.

However, due to the inherent security properties of the blockchain, smart contract applications are unable to natively interact with external APIs, creating what is known as the oracle problem. In order to overcome this, we required an additional piece of infrastructure known as a blockchain oracle, which can deliver external data from our API to blockchain-based smart contracts in a secure, reliable, and properly formatted manner. 

Upon examining various solutions, we found Chainlink to offer the most time-tested and battle hardened oracle solution, along with a large and growing network effect of data providers and blockchain applications already supplying and consuming data through it. Some of the key features we found unique to the Chainlink Network include:

• Data Quality – Through our Chainlink node, we can cryptographically sign each data point we broadcast on the blockchain, preventing man-in-the middle attacks by proving to users the origin of our data. 

• Blockchain Agnostic – Chainlink nodes can integrate into any blockchain network, serving as a single gateway for supplying and/or selling data to any current and future blockchain.

• Network Effect – Chainlink is the most widely used oracle network in DeFi and already secures billions of dollars in value for blockchain applications, meaning there is a large consumer base already built up and growing.

• Trusted Infrastructure – Chainlink is thoroughly audited open-source software built upon strong academic research and maintained by a large and growing developer community, ensuring high levels of security and reliability.

We look forward to using Chainlink to bring our world class APIs to blockchain developers around the world, empowering them to build more advanced and unique DeFi applications supported by high-quality, cryptographically secure financial data. We’re confident that we can become established as a leading Chainlink oracle node for financial market data by bringing our experience and expertise into this new and largely untapped DeFi market. 

“As a team focused on delivering data solutions to the ever-expanding data-driven economy, we were extremely excited at the opportunity to make our API data available across the leading blockchains via the Chainlink Network,” stated Rishi Singh, CEO of Tiingo. “By running our own Chainlink node, we can now actively participate in provisioning a new wave of applications and services that bring freedom and equity to users around the world by ensuring that those data-driven products are triggered by accurate, transparent data feeds in a highly reliable manner.”

About the Chainlink Network

Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universal smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains and real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink introduces a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.

Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.

Docs | Discord | Reddit | YouTube | Telegram | Events | GitHub | Price Feeds | DeFi | VRF

About Tiingo

Tiingo is an award-winning financial analytics and data platform that powers thousands of asset managers, technology firms, and individuals across the globe. Unique in its position as both a consumer of its data and distributer, Tiingo is trusted by firms across the industry for its clean and unique datasets, which are engineered for the discovery of new alpha sources. With a mission deeply rooted in democratizing access to financial analytics and data, Tiingo is also a leader in financial education for future generations, having partnered with research departments at universities across the world to advocate for financial markets literacy. 

Formed in 2014, Tiingo holds that belief that love is the ideal way to conduct business. We are a team made up of artists, engineers, and algorithmic hedge fund traders. Some of us have been professional photographers, and others have created trading algos managing hundreds of millions of dollars. We are united with the same goal: to make everyone’s life easier in the ways we know how. 

To learn more about Tiingo’s APIs visit https://api.tiingo.com and to learn more about the Tiingo analytics engine, visit https://www.tiingo.com.

It’s here, it’s finally here.

The Official Tiingo API has launched after months and months of people requesting this, followed by months and months of dev time. The reason it took so long? We didn’t just do standard-API stuff, but we built infrastructure in exchange data centers to help significantly reduce to costs to everyday users to financial technology firms and Institutional players.

For example, EOD data is included in the Tiingo price, whereas for financial technology firms: real-time data is $500/month instead of $4200/month.

In summary: the entire API was built with the idea, “how much can we give and get away with it?” instead of, “how much can we charge and get away with it.”

And with that here’s the lowdown:

Link: https://api.tiingo.com/
Docs: https://api.tiingo.com/docs/general/overview
Our technological approach: https://api.tiingo.com/about/difference
The origin story: https://api.tiingo.com/about/origin

There exist a few limitations:

1. Every user is entitled to 40GB of bandwidth a month. Yes we realize that’s insane – it’s why we did it.
2. Every user gets 10k requests an hour and 100k requests a day. We plan to increase these as more datasets come online and as we phase out of beta. You can monitor your usage at: https://api.tiingo.com/account/usage
3. In order for us to track these limitations, we will need you to create an account (hope that’s ok!)

We’ve worked hard to make the documentation super simple to use. You can view them here: https://api.tiingo.com/docs/general/overview

Here are our datasets:

Included in Tiingo.com

• EOD Data 
  • End of Day price data for over 37,000 tickers including ADRs and Chinese stocks
• Mutual Fund Data
  • Getting ready for launch
• Technicals
  • Getting ready for launch

Additional (for Financial Technology)

• IEX Price Data
  • Tiingo is the first Financial Technology company to bring IEX Real-time data to the mainstream public
  • IEX Real-time data for $500/month versus $4200+/month for other services
  • Websockets and REST implementation

For those of  you who have been keeping up with this blog, the Javascript container process is something I’ve been following closely for the past decade. Earlier in the year, Peter Kruger from Microsoft reached out asking if I could test their latest implementation, which we presented at //Build. It was an honor, and since then I’ve been advocating Microsoft and OpenFin’s implementation as my favorites.

In a nutshell: The Javascript container process let’s you take a JS website and make it feel native to the operating system – whether it’s iOS, Droid, or Windows. We’re going to cover the Windows Live Tile implementation here.

For those of you with Windows machines, tablets, or phones (okay Surface users and PCs) – you may see what Windows calls “Live tiles.” Windows 8 may have overdone it 😉 but Windows 10 nailed it. Tiles allow you to gain a snapshot of what the app is doing without having to open it. I always found this implemented on Android clumsy from a UI standpoint and the feature is mostly non-existent on iOS -with the exception of a Apple-apps like weather and the clock. I use an iPhone for the record.

But – Microsoft nailed it IMO with the perfect amount of structure and dynamic content. Whereas Android has widgets which are all sorts of shapes, Microsoft forces structure and lets you “snap” together tiles.

E.g.

Notice the Tiingo one? Yeah we like it it too 🙂

We’re going to cover how we got these going in our pure-Javascript implementation. It didn’t require any native coding which was nice. It turns out if you’re using Hosted Web Apps, which let you convert your Javascript web app into Windows app, Microsoft injects a Windows library that you can use to interact with Windows.

This GitHub page does a good overview, but we’re going to go a little more in-depth. Still a good read-through: https://microsoftedge.github.io/WebAppsDocs/en-US/win10/HWAfeatures.htm

 

Step 1 – Download the source code/generate the manifest

You need to generate source code, or a manifest file for this to work. If you don’t know what it is (like me initially), you can use App Studio which has a wizard and takes care of this for you. Visit here: http://appstudio.windows.com/en-us, make an account, and then created a “Hosted Web App” via this URL: http://appstudio.windows.com/projects/create

When you’re done with the wizard, click “Generate” and download the Source code.

Once you the source code, you can open it up via Visual Studio. You can download the Community edition for $0 here: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx

Step 2 – Choose a Template

Microsoft has pre-generated templates that you can “fill-in.” In reality, these are XML templates where you can change the content and then update it. So we’re going to choose a template, populate it with data, and then send the notification update to the Windows Notification library

Find a template that you like. We’re going to change the content in them to present the data that we want. You can see the catalog here:  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh761491.aspx

For Tiingo, we went with tileWide310x150Text05 . Keep track of this “identifier” code as we will need it in our javascript code.

I like the idea of clean, text and for financial data images are not as necessary. Maybe later we will include them for news stories, but first I wanted to include text.

Once you choose the template, you can scroll down and see the XML. For tileWide310x150Text05  it looked like (taken from MSFT’s website):

<tile>
  <visual>
    <binding template="TileWideText05">
      <text id="1">Text Field 1</text>
      <text id="2">Text Field 2</text>
      <text id="3">Text Field 3</text>
      <text id="4">Text Field 4</text>
      <text id="5">Text Field 5</text>
    </binding>  
  </visual>
</tile>

<tile>
  <visual version="2">
    <binding template="TileWide310x150Text05" fallback="TileWideText05">
      <text id="1">Text Field 1</text>
      <text id="2">Text Field 2</text>
      <text id="3">Text Field 3</text>
      <text id="4">Text Field 4</text>
      <text id="5">Text Field 5</text>
    </binding>  
  </visual>
</tile>

Step 3 – Update the tile in your JS code

Next we have to tell Windows when to update the data and what to do.
We used this snippet, check the comments to see what each line means:

//See if the Windows namespace is available (injected by Windows for HWAs)
if (typeof Windows !== 'undefined' && typeof Windows.UI !== 'undefined' &&
typeof Windows.UI.Notifications !== 'undefined') { 
     
     //setting dummy market data
     var marketData = {spy : {returns : .05}, newsLinks: [{title: "Headline 1"}, {title: "Headline 2"} ]};
     //Get the Windows UI Notifications
     var windowsNotifications = Windows.UI.Notifications;
 
     //Load in the template, which will contain the XML we can modify
     var tileTemplate = windowsNotifications.TileTemplateType.tileWide310x150Text05;
     var tileXML = windowsNotifications.TileUpdateManager.getTemplateContent(tileTemplate);
 
     //We now get all the text elements and append text nodes
     var tileText = tileXML.getElementsByTagName('text');
     //First line will be a header
     tileText[0].appendChild(tileXML.createTextNode("Market Snapshot"));
 
     //Next we get the returns and append a "+" sign if the return is >0. For negative numbers, JS defaults to appending a "-"
     if(marketData.spy.returns > 0) 
          tileText[1].appendChild(tileXML.createTextNode("S&P 500 +" + (marketData.spy.returns * 100).toFixed(2).toString() + "%"));
     else
          tileText[1].appendChild(tileXML.createTextNode("S&P 500 " + (marketData.spy.returns * 100).toFixed(2).toString() + "%"));
 
     //Next we add the news headlines
     tileText[2].appendChild(tileXML.createTextNode(marketData.newsLinks[0].title));
     tileText[3].appendChild(tileXML.createTextNode(marketData.newsLinks[1].title));
 
     //Create the TileNotification, passing our modified XML template and then send the update command
     var tileNotification = new windowsNotifications.TileNotification(tileXML);
     var tileUpdater = windowsNotifications.TileUpdateManager.createTileUpdaterForApplication().update(tileNotification);
 }

Since we are using Angular, we wrapped the initial call in a $timeout() and then set an $interval to get the marketData JSON object from our back-end every 30 seconds.

 

Step 4 – Test the app by running it in Visual Studio, pin the app to your start menu, and voila!

Beautiful!