Documentation
1. Data Providers Overview
- Created
- Jun 5, 2026
- Updated
- Jun 21, 2026
Every chart is backed by a data provider that supplies bars, ticker metadata, and realtime updates. Fractal Chart ships five providers, chosen automatically by the kind of symbol you open.
The providers
| Provider | Covers | API key |
|---|---|---|
| Massive | US equities and other instruments, plus corporate-action data (news, earnings, dividends, splits) | Required |
| Alpaca | US equities only — bars, a shallow instrument overview, news, dividends, and splits (no earnings) | Required (key id and secret) |
| Binance | Crypto spot pairs (e.g. BTCUSDT, ETHUSDT) and USDⓈ-M perpetual futures via public endpoints | Not required |
| OKX | Crypto spot pairs (e.g. BTC-USDT, ETH-USDT) and linear perpetual swaps (e.g. BTC-USDT-SWAP) via public v5 endpoints | Not required |
| Kraken | Crypto spot pairs (e.g. BTC/USD, ETH/USD) and perpetual futures (e.g. PF_XBTUSD) via public endpoints | Not required |
Massive and Alpaca both serve US equities; Binance, OKX, and Kraken all serve crypto. Massive is the default and preferred equity provider — when both are configured, equities use Massive first, then Alpaca. For crypto, providers resolve in order Binance → OKX → Kraken.
Each crypto provider uses its own native symbol format: Binance concatenates (
BTCUSDT), OKX uses dash-separated instrument IDs (BTC-USDT,BTC-USDT-SWAP), and Kraken uses a slash for spot (BTC/USD) and its exact perpetual id for futures (PF_XBTUSD). The symbol search dialog normalizes separators so a query in one convention also surfaces matching pairs from the others; Kraken instruments are searched exactly as Kraken names them.
What a provider supplies
- Bars — the OHLCV candles for each timeframe.
- Ticker resolution — turning what you type into a canonical symbol on the right provider.
- Metadata — an instrument overview (Alpaca's is shallow: name, exchange, and type only; it has no rich fundamentals).
- Corporate actions — news, dividends, and splits feed the Event & Session Overlays. Massive also supplies earnings; Alpaca does not. Binance, OKX, and Kraken do not carry corporate-action feeds.
- Realtime streams — live bar updates (see Realtime vs Delayed Data).
Choosing where requests run
Provider requests can run two ways — directly from the browser (Frontend mode) or through the app's own API routes (Backend mode). In the browser, Massive and Alpaca use native fetch; on the server, Alpaca uses the official Alpaca SDK. Binance, OKX, and Kraken use public endpoints with no credentials in either mode. (Kraken's futures REST is reached through a same-origin proxy because its futures host does not send CORS headers — see Realtime vs Delayed Data.) This and API-key setup are covered next.
Next steps
Set up keys and choose how data is fetched.