Latency
This article describes how quickly Santiment metrics become available after the underlying events occur. Use this as a reference when building time-sensitive integrations or setting alert thresholds.
- On-Chain Latency
- Social Data Latency
- Funding Rates Latency
- Price Latency
- Development Activity Latency
- Daily Metrics Latency
On-Chain Latency
On-chain metric computation starts only after a block receives enough confirmations to be considered final. The confirmation time varies by blockchain:
- Bitcoin — ~30 minutes
- Ethereum — ~5 minutes
- Bitcoin Cash — ~5 minutes
- Litecoin — ~5 minutes
- Binance Chain — ~5 minutes
- XRPL — ~5 minutes
Once a block is confirmed and its data is fetched, an additional processing step is required:
- 5-minute interval metrics — processing takes up to 20 minutes
- Daily metrics — processing can take up to 2 hours
Observed Availability
End-to-end latency measured for specific on-chain metric groups:
| Metric Group | Mean | Median | P80 | P90 | P95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core ETH | ~12 min | 10 min | 15 min | 20 min | 21 min |
| ERC-20 Intraday | ~30 min | 30 min | 35 min | 40 min | 45 min |
Social Data Latency
Raw social messages from Telegram, Reddit, Bitcointalk, Twitter, 4chan, and YouTube are each processed independently. Individual message ingestion typically takes under 1 minute per source.
Aggregated social metrics require an additional computation step on top of the raw data. The time this takes depends on the specific metric:
- Emerging Trends — computed once per hour; available a few minutes after each round hour
- Asset-level data (e.g., social volume per asset) — takes 5–10 minutes to compute
- Text term queries — computed on-the-fly directly from the raw message store; available immediately after ingestion
Observed Availability
End-to-end latency observed for the key social metrics:
| Metric | Mean | Median | P80 | P90 | P95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social Volume | ~13 min | 10 min | 15 min | 20 min | 20 min |
| Social Dominance | ~22 min | 20 min | 25 min | 30 min | 35 min |
Social Dominance shows higher latency than Social Volume because it requires aggregated data across all tracked assets before the relative share can be calculated, making it more sensitive to processing delays in any single asset’s pipeline.
Funding Rates Latency
The funding rates are updated every 15 minutes.
This makes funding rate data suitable for near-real-time monitoring of derivatives market conditions, with a worst-case delay of just under 15 minutes.
Price Latency
The prices are updated every 5 minutes.
Price data is one of the lowest-latency data categories available in the Santiment API and can be relied upon for near-real-time price tracking.
Development Activity Latency
The development activity metrics are updated every 1 hour with delays of up to 3 hours in edge cases.
Due to the nature of repository event aggregation, development activity metrics are not suitable for real-time monitoring and are better used for trend analysis over longer time horizons.
Daily Metrics Latency
Daily metrics produce one value per day. The value for a given day is finalized at least 1 hour after midnight UTC. All daily metrics use the UTC timezone as the reference boundary.
This means that daily metric values for a given day should not be considered final until at least 01:00 UTC the following day.