Tick Data in the Crypto Age: Analytics & Compliance

By the OneTick Team (Drawing on experience from Jeff Banker, Peter Simpson, & Phil Perrault)

The digital asset landscape is rapidly maturing. This transformation necessitates high-performance infrastructure capable of handling the unique demands of cryptocurrency market data for both sophisticated analytics and stringent regulatory compliance.

Access to tick data—the most granular view into market activity—is essential. However, firms require more than just raw feeds; they need a unified platform that can provide clean, contextualized data and the advanced tools necessary to extract value from massive volumes of time-series data.

OneTick has focused on solving the hard problems of market data infrastructure to enable institutional-grade solutions in this evolving space.

The Institutionalization of Crypto Markets

The regulatory setting for cryptocurrency is evolving at an enormously rapid rate. Since the first US regulation guidance in 2013, the pace of acceleration has been extraordinarily fast, particularly in recent years. Regulators are focusing heavily on the pricing tools and data inputs that institutional managers use.

This regulatory and institutional interest is driving demand for comprehensive data solutions:

Multi-Asset Focus: While the market was once primarily single-asset (Bitcoin), it is increasingly viewed as a multi-asset environment, with rising interest in non-Bitcoin crypto assets like Ethereum, DeFi, and NFTs.

Stablecoins and New Oversight: The introduction of the GENIUS Act (Guaranteeing Essential Non-bank Issuance of U.S. Stablecoins Act) marks a significant development in U.S. digital-asset regulation. The Act establishes a federal framework for payment stablecoins, defining reserve requirements, audit standards, and supervisory authority for issuers. This legislation underscores the growing recognition of stablecoins as a core component of institutional crypto infrastructure.

Liquid Token Demand: Institutional focus is swinging toward the liquid token market, which represents well over a trillion dollars, compared to roughly $300 billion in crypto venture capital.

Data Requirements: Meeting these needs requires institutional-grade crypto market data that delivers granular, tick-level trade and order book information across numerous venues in a normalized and timely format. OneTick leverages partnerships, such as with LO:TECH, to secure the data precision and reliability required for demanding use cases.

High-Performance Tick Analytics for Alpha Generation

OneTick Cloud is designed to make tick analytics cloud-native, real-time, scalable, and developer-friendly. This platform handles both real-time and historical data through a single engine, addressing the latency and inconsistency problems introduced by using separate tools for streaming and backtesting.

The platform’s capabilities are built to empower quants and traders, providing the necessary tools to develop alpha-generating strategies:

• Flexible Data Access: Users can query market data assets through various APIs, including Interactive SQL, Python / Pandas APIs, REST API, or the highly flexible directed graph query language.
• Order Book Depth Analysis: The platform allows users to look beyond basic quotes (top bid and ask) to determine the actual price required to trade a given quantity. OneTick can rebuild the order book, calculate the Value Weighted Average Price (VWAP) for an accumulated size, and track how this changes across time and venues.
• Speed and Scale: OneTick is highly optimized, capable of processing massive amounts of data very quickly. For instance, statistical calculations like daily VWAP, standard deviation, and trade counts can be run across months of trade data in a matter of seconds. The system has the capacity to look at over five thousand order books simultaneously.
• Visualization and Exploration: Tools like the OneTick Data Explorer and dashboard functionalities allow for the visualization of statistics, such as hourly drops in percent change, and provide macro information through tree maps that aggregate data across all exchanges. These dashboards can operate on historical data or simultaneously with streaming data via Complex Event Processing (CEP).

Regulatory Compliance and Advanced Surveillance

Trade surveillance is a mission-critical application supported by OneTick for institutional clients, exchanges, and service providers. OneTick’s Trade Surveillance solutions are designed to address the most demanding regulatory regimes globally, including MiFID II, MAR, IIROC, and MiCAR.

Effective surveillance requires a strong data foundation. OneTick implements rigorous data ingestion processes, normalization, and dynamic data QA to ensure data quality and completeness before analytics or alerts are performed.

Key capabilities for detecting misconduct include:

• Comprehensive Alert Coverage: The system detects a wide array of misconduct activities, including Wash Trading and Cross Trading (customizable to detect circular trading patterns, often associated with money laundering). It also covers Spoofing, Layering, Insider Trading, and various forms of Market Manipulation.
• GenAI and Machine Learning (ML): OneTick strategically leverages AI and ML to reduce false positives and trigger alerts more intelligently. This includes self-tuning alert models that adjust parameters dynamically based on market conditions, and ML models that calculate scores to rank and prioritize the strongest cases for investigation.
• Deep Investigation Tools: OneTick's Smart Compliance Insights Lab (SC(A)IL) provides a dedicated SaaS environment based on JupyterLab. This powerful solution allows compliance analysts to conduct deep ad-hoc investigations by asking questions using SQL, Python & Pandas, or even natural language through a RAGenAI query assistant. This significantly enhances analysts' ability to explore and visualize data beyond standard alert contexts.

Conclusion

The convergence of accelerating crypto regulation and institutional demand means that modern, high-performance tick data platforms are no longer optional—they are foundational for success.

By leveraging the power of OneTick’s time-series engine and cloud-native architecture, firms can gain unified access to the precision data and sophisticated analytics needed for both alpha generation and robust regulatory oversight.

Want to see OneTick’s Crypto Analytics and Compliance solutions in action?

Request a demo with our data experts today.

Best wishes,

The OneTick Team

(Drawing on experience from Jeff Banker, Peter Simpson, Phil Perrault, and others)