Best DeFi APIs: How to Choose The Right One (2026 Guide)

DeFi has moved past the era of single-chain, single-protocol apps. Today's wallets, portfolio trackers, and trading platforms need to pull data from dozens of chains and protocols. And users expect it all to load instantly. The API you choose to power that experience shapes everything. It determines how fast you ship, how accurate your data is, and how well your product scales.

This guide breaks down what DeFi APIs actually do, what to look for, and how the leading options compare in practice.

What is a DeFi API?

A DeFi API lets developers access decentralized finance data and functionality without running their own infrastructure.

Instead of dealing with raw blockchain data, a DeFi API delivers structured, queryable information through standard endpoints.

The underlying challenge is significant. Blockchain data is inherently unstructured.

For example, a user's "deposit in Aave" is a series of token approvals, transactions, and receipt tokens across multiple contract calls. Turning that into something a product can display requires deep protocol-level indexing, chain-specific decoding logic, and continuous maintenance as protocols upgrade.

DeFi APIs abstract that complexity so development teams can focus on building products rather than infrastructure.

Types of DeFi APIs

Not all DeFi APIs solve the same problem. They generally fall into two categories, and understanding the distinction matters when evaluating options.

Protocol interaction APIs 

These APIs provide programmatic access to DeFi protocol operations: swapping, supplying liquidity, staking, lending, depositing, withdrawing, and more. 

These are transactional interfaces. You send a request, and the API helps construct or route an onchain action. Most of these APIs focus on aggregating different protocols that offer a specific service, such as swapping or staking. 

Data APIs 

These APIs read and interpret onchain state. This is the larger category, and it breaks down further:

• Fetching protocol positions. This is the hardest problem in DeFi data. A raw token balance shows that a wallet holds 500 aUSDC, but it doesn't indicate that those tokens represent a supply position in Aave v3 on Arbitrum. Position-aware APIs interpret these balances, mapping them to specific protocols and surfacing them as human-readable positions with context.
• Fetching DEX prices. Token pricing in DeFi is fragmented across hundreds of decentralized exchanges and liquidity pools. Price APIs aggregate quotes across these sources, providing real-time and historical pricing data. This is essential for portfolio valuation, trade routing, and analytics.
• Fetching DeFi transactions. Raw blockchain transactions are sequences of internal calls, token transfers, and event logs. Transaction APIs decode and categorize these into meaningful operations: "deposited on Aave" rather than a list of hex-encoded function calls and event signatures.

Most DeFi apps need all three data retrieval capabilities working together. A portfolio tracker that shows token balances but can't display DeFi positions is incomplete. A transaction feed that shows raw transfers without protocol context is unusable. The best DeFi data APIs handle all three in a unified schema.

Now let's briefly discuss the benefits of using these APIs.

Benefits of Using DeFi APIs

Faster development

Building DeFi data infrastructure from scratch is a multi-month undertaking.

You need to run archive nodes (or reliable RPC providers) for every chain you want to support. Then you need to build indexers that decode protocol-specific smart contract events. You need to keep those decoders updated as protocols upgrade, handle chain reorganizations, manage caching and data freshness for all of it.

A good DeFi API compresses months of infrastructure work into a single integration, letting teams ship product features in days rather than quarters.

Better user experience

Users don't think in terms of smart contract addresses and transaction hashes. They think in terms of "my Aave deposits" and "the swap I did yesterday."

DeFi APIs that deliver interpreted, human-readable data help products present information the way users think about it.

Choosing a DeFi API

When evaluating DeFi APIs, five factors tend to determine whether an integration succeeds or becomes a source of ongoing engineering pain.

• Chain coverage. How many networks does the API support, and how deeply? Raw chain count matters less than coverage of chains where value and users actually concentrate. An API that supports 20 chains covering 95% of total DeFi TVL is more useful than one supporting 80 chains where half have minimal activity.
• Protocol coverage. This is where the real differentiation happens. Supporting Aave, Uniswap, and Lido is table stakes. The question is whether the API can interpret positions across hundreds of other protocols your users might be in. The gaps here are immediately visible to users because their assets disappear.
• Data format. Does the API return raw token balances, or does it return interpreted positions with protocol context, USD valuations, and enriched metadata? Raw data gives you flexibility but creates more work.
• Latency. For consumer-facing products, response times matter. If a wallet takes 3 seconds to load a portfolio, users notice. The architecture of the API impacts the responsiveness of your application.
• Scalability. Can the API handle your production load? Rate limits, uptime SLAs, and the provider's track record all factor in. APIs that power major consumer applications have been stress-tested in ways that smaller providers haven't.

Top DeFi APIs

Zerion API

Zerion API emerged from the infrastructure behind Zerion Wallet, one of Ethereum's best wallets, serving hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. After years of refining its own indexing infrastructure to power a consumer wallet, Zerion packaged that technology into a public API. The same data layer now powers products including Uniswap Wallet, Kraken Wallet, Privy, Coinbase, and OpenSea.

What it does well. Zerion's defining strength is interpreted DeFi position tracking across 8,000+ protocols on all major EVM chains. A single API call to the positions endpoint returns all of a wallet's DeFi positions across all chains: deposits, loans, staked assets, LP positions, and rewards. Everything is normalized into a consistent schema with USD valuations. Other endpoints also covers decoded transaction histories, profit and loss calculations, and historical balance charts, NFTs, and more.

Performance and scale. Zerion API is built for enterprise-grade consumer products where latency and reliability are non-negotiable. It delivers sub-second response times, supports 1,000+ requests per second for enterprise clients, and maintains 99.9% uptime.

Multichain architecture. Zerion offers a multichain portfolio view by default. Every endpoint automatically aggregates data across all supported chains. You don't make separate calls per chain and stitch results together. One call returns everything. This architecture simplifies integration and reduces both latency and engineering overhead.

Pricing. Starts with a free tier (up to 3k calls/day) and scales from $149 (250k calls/month) to $999 per month (2.5 million calls/month). Custom enterprise agreements are also available, offering 1000+ RPS.

Best for: Enterprise-grade products, both consumer and institutional. Zerion's MCP and Skills also make it great for AI agents.

DeBank API

DeBank is one of the longest-running portfolio trackers in DeFi, and its API (DeBank Cloud) reflects years of protocol-level indexing work.

What it does well. DeBank's core strength is sheer coverage. It supports over 90 chains. Its protocol coverage is also extensive, making it a strong choice when you need to track positions on niche or newly launched protocols. If maximum coverage is your primary concern, DeBank is a serious contender.

Where it gets complicated. DeBank's API architecture often requires per-chain queries for certain operations. While it does offer multichain endpoints, they can be slower to execute and more complex to implement compared to APIs that are multichain by default.

Pricing. The pricing model uses a compute-unit system where complex queries consume more units. This can make cost prediction less straightforward for applications with variable query patterns. There's also no free tier for testing. You need to purchase units before making your first call.

Moralis API

Moralis entered the Web3 space as a full-stack development platform and has evolved into one of the more widely used blockchain data providers.

What it does well. Moralis has a strong developer experience story. Its SDKs, templates, and documentation are designed to get developers productive quickly, making it a popular choice for prototyping and MVPs. It supports a broad set of chains, and its token pricing API is well-regarded for aggregating DEX prices across chains. Moralis also offers DeFi position tracking for major protocols, making it more capable than pure node providers.

Where it shows gaps. Moralis's DeFi position coverage is narrower than specialized wallet data APIs. Positions in smaller or newer protocols may appear as raw token balances rather than interpreted positions. The API architecture typically requires separate calls for each chain, meaning a portfolio query across 10 chains needs 10 calls. This can add latency and backend complexity.

Pricing. Moralis uses a compute-unit model with a free tier for testing and paid plans starting at $49/month (billed annually). Pricing scales based on usage, with compute units varying by API method and chain.

Best for: Teams prioritizing rapid prototyping, developers who want broad blockchain data access alongside SDKs and templates, and applications where DeFi position depth is less critical than general blockchain data coverage.

Blockdaemon API

Blockdaemon occupies a distinct niche in the DeFi API landscape. Where most providers on this list focus on reading and interpreting blockchain data, Blockdaemon's DeFi API is primarily a transactional interface. It helps applications execute DeFi operations rather than just display data.

What it does well. Blockdaemon's DeFi API provides a single access point for executing transactions and interacting with DeFi protocols. This is particularly valuable for institutional applications that need programmatic access to DeFi with enterprise-grade security.

Where it's less suited. If you need wallet portfolio data, Blockdaemon's DeFi API isn't designed for that use case. It's an execution layer, not a data layer. Teams building consumer apps, wallets, or analytics dashboards would need to pair it with a separate data provider.

Pricing. Blockdaemon offers a free tier for initial testing, with paid plans scaling based on compute units and request rates.

Best for: Institutional products that need programmatic DeFi execution with enterprise-grade security, compliance, and audit capabilities.

The Right DeFi API for Your Use Case

There's no single "best" API — the right choice depends on what you're building.

If you're building custom data pipelines, Moralis offers broad blockchain data access that makes it easy to prototype and iterate. Its flexibility as a general-purpose blockchain data provider gives teams the raw materials to build bespoke data layers, even if it means more assembly work on the DeFi position side.

If you're building institutional DeFi features, Blockdaemon is purpose-built for that context. Its DeFi API handles execution with the security certifications and compliance infrastructure that regulated entities require.

For tracking DeFi positions at hedge funds, however, Zerion API can be an easy and efficient choice. It provides interpreted portfolio data across all positions and chains in a single call, and it can even be queried through AI tools like Claude Code. It's great for teams that want to build quick internal dashboards or automate reporting without heavy data engineering investment.

If you're building a wallet or other consumer crypto application, Zerion API is the strongest fit.

Zerion's interpreted DeFi positions directly solve the hardest data problem in consumer crypto products. The same infrastructure powers wallets used by millions of people daily, so the performance, accuracy, and reliability are battle-tested at scale.

Ready to try Zerion API? Get your free developer key and start building with 3,000 requests per day.