Binance's options product, officially the European Options API (EAPI), lists European-style BTC and ETH contracts, quoted in USDT rather than the coin-margined pricing you'd see on Deribit. If you're pricing, backtesting, or comparing Binance options against another venue, the practical question isn't whether Binance has an API. It does, and it's free. The question is how much history you can actually pull from it.
What Binance options data includes
An order book snapshot for a Binance option gives you the resting bid and ask sizes at each price level for one instrument at one moment. A trade record gives you what actually executed: price, size, and side. Together they're the difference between knowing a contract's last price and knowing what it would have cost to actually get filled.
Binance options are named by underlying, expiry, strike, and side, for example BTC-260819-61500-C: BTC underlying, expiring 2026-08-19, $61,500 strike, call. Every instrument trades as its own contract with its own order book. There's no single "Binance options" feed; there's one feed per contract, per expiry, per strike.
Binance's official API vs third-party data: the real limit is the window, not access
Unlike Kalshi, Binance doesn't gate its market-data API behind identity verification. Anyone can query it, free, no account required for public market data. That answers "is the Binance API free" directly: yes.
The actual constraint is narrower and easy to miss until you hit it. Binance's official EAPI historical data has existed since 2023-06-15, but order-history queries are capped at the last 5 days of finished orders. Real-time data streams fine. Anything older than five days back is out of reach through the official endpoints, no matter how far back the underlying market itself goes. For a quick check on current positioning, that's not a problem. For backtesting a strategy over months, or studying how open interest built up ahead of an event, it is.
That gap is what third-party providers, Convex Lake included, exist to fill: capturing and archiving the book and trade history Binance's own API only exposes for a five-day window.
Schema: orderbook and trades
| Endpoint | Key fields | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| GET /orderbook | 10-level bid/ask prices and sizes (bid_p1–bid_p10, bid_s1–bid_s10, same for ask), Unix millisecond timestamp | 41 columns total, one file per instrument per UTC date |
| GET /trades | id, timestamp_ms, price (premium, USDT), qty (contracts), side (buy/sell) | One file per instrument per date |
Both are scoped with exchange=binance. Prices are already USDT-denominated, so unlike Deribit's coin-margined quoting, there's no separate step converting premium into USD terms.
Field names above reflect the current API docs at time of writing. Always check the API docs for the live reference before integrating.
Quickstart
- Get an API key. Binance options data requires a Research or Pro tier key; it isn't available on the free plan.
- Scope the request with
exchange=binanceplus an instrument ticker and date. - Pull the file.
curl -O -J -H "x-api-key: do_YOUR_KEY" \ "https://api.convexlake.com/orderbook?exchange=binance&ticker=BTC-260819-61500-C&date=2026-08-15"
Common research use cases
Cross-venue spread comparison is the most immediate use: Binance and Deribit both list BTC and ETH options, so the same expiry and strike often exist on both, and comparing quoted spreads and depth between them shows directly how much thinner Binance's book typically is. Short-window volatility studies work too, even with weeks rather than years of history: comparing implied moves priced into Binance options against realized moves over the same window is a real, self-contained study you don't need years of data to run.
What doesn't work yet, honestly, is anything requiring multi-year history: seasonal patterns, comparing behavior across multiple market cycles, or backtesting a strategy over a long stretch. The archive isn't there yet for Binance specifically. Deribit is the better venue for that kind of study today; Binance's archive will support it once enough time has passed since the 2026-08-11 start date.
Data quality pitfalls to watch for
Ticker parsing. Strike, expiry, and side all live inside the instrument string (BTC-260819-61500-C), not as separate fields on every record. Parse it once into structured columns rather than re-splitting the string throughout an analysis; a strike-format assumption that holds for BTC contracts won't necessarily hold if ETH strikes are formatted differently.
Thin-book noise. With materially lower volume than Deribit, individual large orders move the quoted book more visibly on Binance. A strategy that looks stable on Deribit's deeper book can show much noisier fills here purely from thinner liquidity, not from anything wrong with the strategy itself.
UTC date boundaries. Files are organized one per instrument per UTC date. A trade near midnight UTC can land in a different day's file than a naive local-time read would expect, worth checking explicitly if timestamps and file dates ever seem to disagree.
Coverage start date. Nothing before 2026-08-11 exists for Binance options on Convex Lake, regardless of how far back Binance's own market goes. Confirm current coverage dates before assuming a longer history than actually exists.
What to know before you build on this
Binance options coverage on Convex Lake is BTC and ETH only, matching what Binance itself lists for European options. Data capture started 2026-08-11, so the archive is real but currently short, weeks, not years. If a research question needs multi-year history, this isn't there yet for Binance specifically; Deribit's archive goes back further, given it's been captured longer. Check current coverage dates in the docs before assuming depth that isn't there yet.
Binance options also see materially lower volume and open interest than Deribit's BTC/ETH options, which have dominated the crypto options market for years. Thinner books mean wider effective spreads and a smaller sample of trades to work with per contract, expect that going in rather than discovering it mid-analysis.
FAQ
Is the Binance API free?
Yes, for market data. Binance doesn't require identity verification to access public market-data endpoints, unlike Kalshi. Convex Lake's Binance options data specifically requires a Research or Pro tier key, not the free tier.
Does Binance have an API for options specifically?
Yes, the European Options API (EAPI), separate from Binance's spot and futures APIs. It covers European-style BTC and ETH options.
How far back does Binance's own API let you query historical options data?
Order-history queries are limited to the last 5 days of finished orders. Real-time data has no such limit; historical depth beyond five days requires a third-party archive.
Does Binance provide historical open interest data via API?
Binance's own EAPI provides current open interest through its market-data endpoints, but the same 5-day window applies to querying how it changed over time. A running archive is needed to study open-interest history beyond that window.
How does Binance options data differ from Deribit's?
Binance options are USDT-quoted and European-style; Deribit's are coin-margined. Deribit also carries significantly more volume and a longer available history, since it's been the dominant crypto options venue for longer.
Getting started with Convex Lake's Binance options data
Convex Lake covers Binance options alongside Kalshi, Polymarket, Predict.fun, Limitless, and Deribit under one schema. See the API docs for the current endpoint reference.