Investigating Cryptocurrencies using R

Cryptocurrencies are a fascinating phenomenon and excellent data source for analysis with R.  This post will introduce how to get a list of available currencies into R.  Wikipedia maintains a page with a list of cryptocurrencies.  These can be read from HTML into a data frame.

library(httr) library(XML) results = GET(“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies”) doc = readHTMLTable(doc=content(results, “text”)) View(doc[1])

This list is not complete.  Also, an API would be preferable to reading a wiki page.  A publicly available API at cryptocompare.com provides similar information in JSON format.

library(jsonlite) library(data.table) response = fromJSON(‘https://www.cryptocompare.com/api/data/coinlist’) df = data.table::rbindlist(response$Data, fill=TRUE) View(df)

With a bit of shiny code, this data can be served up in a web application and published to shinyapps.io… so you can skip the R coding and review the data here if you prefer:

https://casimir.shinyapps.io/cryptocurr/

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