BTC -
USE CASE/ TRADING BOTSUSE CASEUSDC ON BASEPAY PER CALL

Real-Time API for AI Trading Bots

Composed market and macro data, bearer-token auth, USDC micropayments. No subscription, no KYC, no human in the loop.

If you're building an autonomous trading bot, you have a payments problem before you have a data problem. Most paid market-data APIs (Messari, CoinAPI, Alpha Vantage paid, Polygon.io) require a human signup, KYC, and a $50-$500 monthly subscription before your bot can fetch a single quote. That's a UX bug for the agent economy. TerminalFeed's premium API tier is built around the opposite assumption: your bot has a wallet, not an email address.

WHAT AN AI TRADING BOT ACTUALLY NEEDS

A working trading agent (whether it's an LLM-driven research-and-execute loop, a classic algo bot calling functions, or a multi-agent system orchestrated by something like LangGraph) typically needs all of the following on every decision cycle:

  • Live crypto prices and 24-hour change for the assets it trades
  • Order-book depth and recent trade volume context
  • Bitcoin network state (gas, mempool, fees) if it touches BTC L1
  • Ethereum gas oracle if it touches ETH-based DEXs
  • Macro context: Fed funds rate, treasury yields, USD index, VIX
  • US equity index reference (SPY, QQQ, DIA) for cross-asset signals
  • Sentiment markers: Fear & Greed Index, top news
  • Optional: prediction-market odds on macro events (Polymarket)

Without TerminalFeed, your bot makes 8-15 separate HTTP calls to 8-15 separate providers, each with its own auth, its own rate-limit pool, its own schema, and its own failure modes. With TerminalFeed, three calls cover the entire decision surface for $0.10 per cycle.

THREE ENDPOINTS, ONE BEARER TOKEN
EndpointCostComposes
/api/pro/briefing$0.02BTC + Fear&Greed + earthquakes + HN + Polymarket prediction markets
/api/pro/macro$0.04Fed rate + CPI + unemployment + GDP + 10Y treasury + forex (EUR/JPY/GBP/CHF) + commodities (oil, nat gas) via FRED/Frankfurter

Each endpoint absorbs the upstream cost, key management, and rate limits. You bring one bearer token, get one schema, handle one set of failure modes. If an upstream is degraded, we serve stale cache rather than 5xx, so your bot never gets surprised by a `null` quote in the middle of a decision.

COMPLETE TRADING BOT LOOP IN PYTHON

Below is a full reference loop. Drop into any agent runtime that exposes requests (which is most of them, including LangChain tool-calling layers, AutoGPT, and custom orchestrators). Replace the strategy function with your actual logic.

import os, time, requests

TF_TOKEN = os.environ["TF_TOKEN"]   # tf_live_<64-char-hex>
TF_BASE  = "https://terminalfeed.io"
HEADERS  = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {TF_TOKEN}"}

def fetch_decision_context():
    """One decision cycle. Costs 4 credits = $0.08 at $1 USDC = 50 credits."""
    macro = requests.get(f"{TF_BASE}/api/pro/macro", headers=HEADERS, timeout=10).json()
    context = requests.get(f"{TF_BASE}/api/pro/agent-context", headers=HEADERS, timeout=10).json()
    return {"macro": macro, "context": context}

def strategy(ctx):
    fed_rate = ctx["macro"]["economic"]["fed_rate"]["value"]
    ten_year = ctx["macro"]["economic"]["treasury_10y"]["value"]
    # Your trading logic here. This is just an illustrative skeleton.
    if fed_rate is not None and ten_year is not None and ten_year - fed_rate < 0:
        return {"action": "risk_off", "size_usd": 0}
    return {"action": "hold"}

def loop():
    while True:
        ctx = fetch_decision_context()
        decision = strategy(ctx)
        print(decision, "credits left:", ctx)
        time.sleep(300)  # 5 min cadence

if __name__ == "__main__":
    loop()

At a 5-minute cadence the bot spends roughly $0.08 per cycle, $1.00 per hour, $24 per day, $720 per month. That's substantially cheaper than a single $500/month CoinAPI subscription, and you only pay when the bot is running. A bot that pauses overnight pays for nothing overnight.

WHY USDC PAYMENT BEATS SUBSCRIPTION

Three reasons specifically for autonomous bots:

  • No human in the loop. Your bot's wallet pays for the bot's API access. There is no Stripe form, no email verification, no KYC. The bot is autonomous end-to-end.
  • Predictable per-decision cost. Subscription pricing forces you to estimate volume upfront. Pay-per-call lets your bot scale up and down naturally without re-negotiating a contract.
  • Settlement on Base in seconds. If your bot needs to top up credits mid-session, it can do so in one transaction. No waiting for a credit card to clear or for a sales rep to upgrade your plan.
CROSS-SITE BUNDLE WITH TENSORFEED

The same bearer token works on TensorFeed.ai. So if your trading bot also wants AI model intelligence (which model is currently best for code? for routing? for sentiment analysis?) or AI-news context, those calls draw from the same credit pool. One purchase, two data sources, two domains. Same wallet, same credits, same atomic-charge guarantees.

MAINNET PROVEN TODAY
Validated April 27, 2026. 1 USDC sent to 0x549c82e6bfc54bdae9a2073744cbc2af5d1fc6d1, 50 credits minted, bearer token issued, /api/pro/macro called successfully on first try. Tx hash on BaseScan. The same wallet and credit pool serve TensorFeed.ai. Original validation walkthrough.
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