🔎 How to use the Cryptosheets CS.SYMBOLS function to get live or historical data for any crypto asset in Excel & Googlesheets

Published in

Cryptosheets

5 min readJul 17, 2020

The most important crypto data for global adoption above all else isn’t the price or marketcap — it’s the symbol, identifier, ticker, slug, id, name or whatever the hell you want to call it — and that’s exactly the point. Here’s why.

Instantly find data for hundreds of thousands of crypto assets and instruments in Excel & Googlesheets

OVERVIEW

A friend told you to check out some new crypto token and you did some ‘research’. “It’s gonna be huge” they tell you. Undervalued and under the radar they say. Ok that’s great but now you need to find some actual data to justify doing… whatever you’re thinking about doing.

“It’s gonna be HUGE bro. They call it ‘SHIT’ token— that’s the actual ticker… and it trades on some exchange somewhere.”

🆔 The single most important piece of data in any/all markets is the identifier of whatever you’re looking at, trading, researching, managing or otherwise. In traditional institutional finance every stock, bond, option, indicator you’ve ever heard of has at least half a dozen unique identifiers to ensure that global market makers, custodians and bookkeepers stay in sync.
🌐 This is what allows markets in countries around the globe accurately refer to and trade the same ‘thing’ with confidence. These highly structured IDs are maintained and validated by a handful of large, centralized global entities like central banks (ECB), international organizations (ISO, DTCC) and regulators (SEC, CFTC).
❓ Because there is no “SEC of crypto” or “Central Bank of Blockchain”, there are no internationally agreed upon rules or regulations for which identifier represents what crypto asset. Seems silly, right?

Quick Thought Exercise:

You bought some AAPL stock yesterday. Today you go to sell it and there are now three different AAPL symbols or tickers… wtf do you do?

**Which one is right…?** How about the one with the best price? hmmmm (*I started writing this article 3.5 years ago in my head after getting badly burned on a simple trade for something called “CAT”)

📖 HOW TO USE

SYMBOLS is specifically designed to be very flexible so it can be used anywhere in your existing spreadsheets. You can query or filter by ANY combination of the returned data fields and ANY of the Cryptosheets global arguments including:

symbol
name
pair
exchange
category
type
global arguments:
_fields, _limit, _orderBy, _count, _distinct, _showHeaders

Combining multiple in any order might look something like this:
=CS.SYMBOLS(“symbol”,B9,”_fields”,”exchange”,”_distinct”,”exchange”,”_orderBy”,”exchange”,”_limit”,”100")

👉 Follow these steps to use CS.SYMBOLS in Excel or Googlesheets

Type =CS.SYMBOLS or =CSSYMBOLS into any cell
Type specific fields and values OR reference specific cells
Add additional transformations, sorting & filtering using global arguments

Quickly find futures contracts for Bitcoin

Quickly find all trading pairs for a given symbol or exchange

👉 TIP: You can also use Cryptosheets templates like the Crypto Symbol Data Finder v1 to quickly find specific data types (and actual live data samples) for each symbol, pair and exchange

Cryptosheets makes it easy to find what symbols trade where and have data

🌐 USE CASES & 6 REAL EXAMPLES TO TRY NOW

Cryptosheets templates like the **Cryptosheets Data Finder v1** help make it easy to find what symbols trade where and have data

Simply copy and paste each/any of these into your Excel or Googlesheet to test the live examples

👉 TIP: To maximize performance the default limit is 10 but you can easily set it to whatever you want by adding the _limit global argument like this: =CS.SYMBOLS("_limit", "50")

Find actively traded derivatives for XTZ
=CS.SYMBOLS("symbol","XTZ","type","perpetual")
Quickly find symbols & internal identifiers from your favorite providers
=CS.SYMBOLS("exchange","cryptocompare") =CS.SYMBOLS("exchange","nomics") =CS.SYMBOLS("exchange","coingecko") =CS.SYMBOLS("exchange","messari") =CS.SYMBOLS("exchange","kaiko")
Screen for cross exchange support of pairs to build arbitrage strategies
=CS.SYMBOLS("symbol","HEX","_distinct","exchange","_limit", "50") =CS.SYMBOLS("symbol","KNC","_distinct","exchange","_limit", "50")
Search for assets with similar names & symbols
=CS.SYMBOLS("name","~CAT")
Screen for liquidity using the # of exchanges as a market maker proxy
=CS.SYMBOLS("_distinct","exchange","_limit","100","_count","pair","symbol","TRX")
Search for supported capital markets assets like crypto related ETFs or publicly traded funds like Grayscale’s BGTC or ETHE
=CS.SYMBOLS("name", "~GRAY", "category", "capMarkets")
Rapidly build drop down lists for models, templates & screeners, use the Cryptosheets Symbol Data Finder v1 template, chain CS.SYMBOLS together with other functions to build powerful dynamic screeners and so much more…

Enhance your trading dashboards, models and screeners by incorporating =CS.SYMBOLS

HOW WE’RE CONTRIBUTING

The global crypto identifier data set is likely the single most important crypto one there is to facilitate genuine global adoption. We are confident this tool can add value to your daily workflow and help you accomplish your objectives by improving efficiency, accuracy and saving tremendous amounts of time.

This might be the single most powerful custom function we have and it’s only going to get better as we continue building, improving and rolling out new proprietary meta data fields for CS.SYMBOLS so stay tuned for future posts on this subject.

👉 You can help contribute by using CS.SYMBOLS in your spreadsheets, suggesting enhancements, identifying bugs and helping promote the powerful transparency of the data to the broader community.

Did you know that while you have been reading this article…

38 new smart contracts were created on the ethereum network
13 listed crypto assets were DElisted from several major exchanges
26 new trading pairs were listed on several major exchanges
1.4 crypto frauds were revealed, rendering their project tokens worthless
18x new leveraged derivative instruments started trading on some exchange you’ve never heard of

… but how could you possibly know that…? 👉 try =CS.SYMBOLS()

RESOURCES

▶️ Cryptosheets is free to sign up and start using now.
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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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