Rates

For convenience, Orbital provides merchants with the ability to pull real-time market rates for various different currency pairs, right from our API. It's important to note that these rates are indicative only, and the merchant should use their own logic for determine how much to credit an end-user balance during a deposit, or how much coin to send in a payout.

We recommend that merchants display the live conversion rate to end-users next to the wallet address during the deposit process. For the Channel Payment Method, we encourage taking things a step further and displaying a currency convertor for the end-user to calculate how much they will receive. We also recommend they do the same during the payout request process.

The Rates API supports any of the supported cryptocurrencies, combined with any ISO standard currency code.

Major Currency Pairs: I.e. any crypto + USD or EUR or GPB

When requesting a currency pair including any crypto with USD/EUR/GBP, Orbital responds with the live market prices from our institutional liquidity provider.

For example, when getting the rate for BTC/EUR

Orbital gets the live EUR price of BTC from our institutional liquidity provider (e.g. €8000).
Returns the result price of 8000 EUR per BTC via API.

Exotic Currency Pairs: I.e. any crypto + any other fiat currency

When requesting any currency pair other than USD/EUR/GBP, then Orbital responds with the live market rate for the Crypto/USD pair from our institutional liquidity provider, and then uses XE.com to convert that USD value in to whatever the chosen other fiat currency is.

For example, when getting the rate for: BTC/CNY

Orbital gets the live USD price of BTC from our institutional liquidity provider (e.g. $9000).
Then Orbital takes that USD value ($9000) and converts it in to CNY using XE.com rates (7.1 CNY per USD).
Returns the result price of 639000 CNY per BTC via API