Profiles Overview
Overview
Profiles are the narrative layer of Coin Metrics reference data. Other reference data endpoints return identifiers, attributes, and other data points that code can act on directly. Profiles carry the information behind them, in prose: why an asset exists, who builds it, how its supply came about, and what kind of network it settles on, as well as other reference points like the maximum supply or the teams behind a project. Every field is written and reviewed by analysts from primary sources, which makes profiles a stable descriptive layer to attach to quantitative work.
Assets and networks
Asset Profiles describe a cryptoasset. Every asset profile carries an identifier, a full name, a short description, a longer overview, a creation date, and, where they exist, a website, a whitepaper, and a supply cap. A subset of assets is curated more deeply and also carries token purpose, project team and foundation, supply generation and vesting detail, issuing and bridged networks, event and upgrade history, and regulatory status including exchange-traded products and their custodians.
Network Profiles describe a blockchain network. They carry an identifier and full name, an overview, the consensus mechanism, hashing algorithm, transaction finality, available node clients, smart contract deployment model, architecture and scaling classification, rollup characteristics where the network is one, the supporting foundations and repositories, and the network's upgrade history.
The two are separate namespaces that overlap without being interchangeable. Some identifiers coincide (btc is both an asset and a network), some do not (the network pol_pos has no asset of that name), and the network names inside an asset profile are display names such as Avalanche C-Chain rather than the avaxc identifier a network profile uses.
Curation and release
Analysts research each profile from primary sources: project websites, whitepapers, specifications and improvement proposals, public repositories, foundation publications, and regulatory filings. Where a project's own material is ambiguous or silent, a field is left uncurated rather than inferred.
A field can carry no information in two ways, and they mean different things. A field that is absent from the response is one that either cannot be commented on or has not yet been researched for that project. A field returning N/A has been researched, and analysts have concluded it is not applicable to that asset or network. Neither state is permanent, and both are revisited and can be amended in later releases.
Changes go through review before they are merged, and are validated against a published schema before they can be released, so a release cannot introduce a malformed profile or silently rename a field.
Profiles are published in discrete releases rather than updated continuously. The API serves a pinned version of the profile dataset, and a release replaces it wholesale. Between releases the response is stable, which makes profiles safe to cache and safe to diff. There is no fixed schedule: releases go out when a batch of new profiles or revisions is ready, and each one is recorded in the change log below.
Two consequences are worth planning around. A newly launched asset does not appear the moment it starts trading, and a change in a project's circumstances is reflected at the next release rather than immediately.
Coverage
Profiles are not published on coverage.coinmetrics.io, and unlike the metric datasets they have no catalog endpoint either. Availability is read from the profile endpoints themselves instead, each of which returns everything it covers when queried with no filters. This is the authoritative list, and it stays current across releases.
/profile/assets: every asset with a profile./profile/networks: every covered network.
Asset profile coverage is a subset of the assets Coin Metrics covers elsewhere, and network profile coverage is narrower still. An asset with market or network data does not necessarily have a profile, and a network named inside an asset profile does not necessarily have a profile of its own. Access to profiles is entitled separately from other datasets, so a key without the entitlement receives an authorization error rather than an empty result.
API Endpoints
Asset ProfilesNetwork ProfilesRelated
Asset Profiles: descriptions of cryptoassets, at
/profile/assets.Network Profiles: descriptions of blockchain networks, at
/profile/networks.Asset Taxonomy: the datonomy classification of the same assets, as codes and names rather than prose.
Change Log
Last updated