Scrape Coinmarketcap
Learn how to extract cryptocurrency data from Coinmarketcap for market analysis.
How to Scrape Coinmarketcap
Cryptocurrency market data is valuable for investors, researchers, and businesses in the blockchain space. Coinmarketcap is one of the most comprehensive sources of cryptocurrency information, listing thousands of coins with detailed metrics.
In this advanced tutorial, we'll show you how to use Scrapify to extract structured data from Coinmarketcap, while respecting their terms of service and implementing best practices for responsible scraping.
Important Disclaimer
Before scraping any website, always check the site's robots.txt file and terms of service. This tutorial is for educational purposes only. For production use, consider using Coinmarketcap's official API instead of scraping their website.
Step 1: Analyzing Coinmarketcap's Structure
Before we start scraping, let's understand the structure of Coinmarketcap's website:
- The main cryptocurrency table is loaded dynamically using JavaScript
- Pagination is implemented through "Next Page" buttons
- Detailed coin information is available on individual coin pages
- Some data points are updated in real-time via WebSocket connections
In this tutorial we will be extracting the data for all of the coins listed on coinmarketcap.com.
Step 2: Setting Up Your Crawler
- In your Scrapify dashboard, create a new crawler and enter the URL of Coinmarketcap
- The new tab will open with the Coinmarketcap homepage with the configuration extension open.
Pro Tip
When scraping data-intensive sites like Coinmarketcap, it's better to make fewer requests that extract more data per page, rather than many small requests. This reduces server load and makes your scraping more efficient.
Step 3: Scroll to Bottom
Coinmarketcap uses progressive loading to load the data for the coins. This means that the data is loaded as you scroll down the page.
- Add a "Scroll to Bottom" action to your crawler
Step 4: Scrape the Initial Page
We must add a dedicated "Scrape" action to scrape all of the coins from the first page. The coins on Coinmarketcap are displayed in a html table so we can use table mode to scrape all of the coins in one click. The table is parsed and added to the Scraped Data table in the extension overlay.
Step 5: Handling Pagination
Coinmarketcap displays only 100 coins per page. We need to add a "Next Page" action to navigate to the next page and repeatly scrape each page until we have scraped all of the coins.
Step 6: Add Nested Actions
Now we must add a "Scroll to Bottom" and "Scrape" action nested inside the "Loop" action to load and then scrape each new page. We can then save the configuration.:
Step 7: Perform the scrape
Now we can perform the scrape. Return to the the Crawlers page in your dashboard and press the "Crawl" button on your newly created crawler. Wait for a few minutes for the crawler to complete and you will have all of the coinmarketcap data in a dataset. You can now export or download this data in multiple file formats.
Conclusion
You've now learned how to build a comprehensive cryptocurrency data scraper for Coinmarketcap using Scrapify. This data can power market analysis tools, investment dashboards, or research projects.
Remember to use this knowledge responsibly - implement appropriate delays between requests, respect Coinmarketcap's terms of service, and consider using their official API for production applications that require frequent data access.