How to Choose a Crypto Portfolio API

Every portfolio API demo looks identical: paste an address, see a portfolio. The differences only surface on wallets that are hard, at volumes that cost money, in month three of an integration.

Here is how to find them in an afternoon instead.

Disclosure: we build one of these. The evaluation below is the one we would run against ourselves, and the benchmark it draws on ranks a competitor above us overall.

Step 1: test with a wallet you already understand

Not the vendor's demo address — a wallet whose contents you can independently verify. Most providers have a free entry point for exactly this; ours is Authless, which needs no key at all.

Ideally one holding: spot tokens, a lending position, an LP position, something staked, and — if relevant to you — a perp or an option. Then compare the API's answer against the protocol UIs.

The single most useful question is whether the total is right. It sounds trivial. It is the whole test, because the category's failure mode is a plausible number rather than an error.

Step 2: ask the questions vendors find awkward

The second row matters most. "Omitted silently" and "flagged as unsupported" are very different products, and only one of them is safe to build reporting on.

Step 3: price the real workload

Per-call pricing is misleading on its own. Model your actual pattern:

• How many addresses, polled how often?
• Does the provider let you batch addresses into one call? (One call with three addresses should cost one unit, not three.)
• Is there a one-off indexing cost for busy addresses? Octav charges one credit per 250 transactions on first sync, which is trivial per wallet and material across a fund's whole address book.
• What does caching give you? Portfolio data cached for a minute means a dashboard refresh is not a new charge.

Step 4: weigh the three-way trade-off

Coverage, cost and latency pull against each other. Decoding positions across many protocols takes time and infrastructure; providers that skip it are faster and cheaper, honestly so.

The benchmark makes the trade-off concrete: Zerion scores 99 on cost and 92 on performance with coverage at 48; Octav scores 100 on coverage with cost at 54 and performance at 40. Neither is better in the abstract. See Octav vs DeBank vs Zerion.

Step 5: check what happens after integration

Things that only matter later, and are painful to retrofit:

• Historical data. Can you ask what a portfolio was worth last quarter? Most providers cannot, because it has to be recorded forward.
• Freshness signals. Is there a way to know how current the data is?
• Agent access. If AI agents will consume this, is there an MCP server or CLI?
• Response stability. Will the shape change under you?

The short checklist

1. Query a wallet you understand. Is the total right?
2. Add a Solana address. Does the total change correctly?
3. Ask what happens on an unsupported position type.
4. Model the real call volume, including first-sync costs.
5. Ask for a portfolio as of a past date.

If a provider passes all five, the rest is implementation detail.