Coinbase provides an API to interact with the platform, check the documentation at https://developers.coinbase.com/api/v2. Even though the available options go from transactions to purchases, here we’ll only be looking into transactions.
The main goal is to retrieve all the available transactions from every available wallet, and convert that information into a Pandas DataFrame. This will ease the data accessibility and manipulation for future analysis.
Create an API Key
API Key is meant for personal use. For building applications for Coinbase users you should use OAuth2.
If you haven’t yet created an API Key, log in to your Coinbase account and navigate to settings to find the API tab.
Since we’re only focusing on the transactions, only the wallet:accounts:read and wallet:transactions:read are necessary. Once the new API Key has been created, save the newly generated API KEY and API SECRET in a file.
Authentication
Coinbase API authentication will be performed by taking advantage of the AuthBase class available in the requests Python package.
When attaching the authentication handler to a request, the __call__ method performs automatically what it has been configured to do during the request setup.
Coinbase Transactions
Transactions are related to an account, which means that to retrieve all transactions from a cryptocurrency, we need to access that cryptocurrency account.
Another important point is that when querying Coinbase accounts, it lists all available accounts in the platform even if they were never used. Since the parameters id and balance.currency are equal for the unused accounts, we’ll use them to filter out the information we are looking for.
If this is not exactly what your looking for, you can always try one of the available libraries at https://developers.coinbase.com/docs/wallet/client-libraries. But be cautious, these have not been security tested by Coinbase, nor are they official.
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