Arkham vs SmartMoneyAPI

A fair comparison

Descriptions of Arkham are our neutral summary of a third-party product, sourced from their own site on 2026-09-23, and may change; check their site for current capabilities. This is not a claim that SmartMoneyAPI is better overall — it is a different, lighter, decision-focused tool.

What the confirmation call looks like

Your strategy produces a candidate direction; this single call validates it before you send the order.

import os, requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://api.smartmoneyapi.com/v1/confirm",
    params={"symbol": "BTC", "direction": "long", "source": "my-bot"},
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SMA_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=10,
)
sig = r.json()

if sig["action"] in ("CONFIRM_FULL", "CONFIRM_REDUCED"):
    qty = 0.01 * sig["size_mult"]   # HIGH -> CONFIRM, MEDIUM -> REDUCE
    # ... your code places (or sizes down) the order
else:  # CONFIRM_MINIMAL, VETO_SKIP, or NO_DATA_SKIP
    pass  # market context does not support this trade, or the symbol has no data yet

action is one of five values — CONFIRM_FULL, CONFIRM_REDUCED, CONFIRM_MINIMAL, VETO_SKIP, or NO_DATA_SKIP (no derivatives or whale data exists for the symbol at all — deliberately not the same as “we looked and it’s bad”). We publish the model’s own out-of-sample result on the /v1/confirm page: derivatives, whale and combined signals all landed in the 49–52% band in leakage-free walk-forward testing — a coin flip. /v1/confirm still blends the signal, because it is a bounded pre-trade check, not a forecast. Full field reference in the API docs.

Pricing comparison

SmartMoneyAPI publishes one flat number per tier, including a $0 tier. Arkham meters by credit weight per endpoint; its clearest published rate is the x402 USDC price ($0.20/credit, no account needed). We found no flat monthly subscription price on Arkham’s own pages. Figures for SmartMoneyAPI are pulled from the live plan list (api_service/plans.json); Arkham’s are our best current read of arkm.com’s public credit-pricing and rate-limit guides, and can change on their side without notice.

Data coverage & asset support

Arkham goes deep on who is moving money and where; SmartMoneyAPI goes deep on whether a specific trade should be confirmed right now. Pick based on whether you need attribution/AML depth or a bot-callable pre-trade gate — many teams end up wanting both.

Real-time capabilities

SmartMoneyAPI is built for programmatic, low-latency signals: whale events arrive over websocket in roughly a second, and the derivatives store refreshes continuously; a full sweep of all 16,000+ tracked wallet positions takes on the order of 5–6 hours, so treat whale-event alerts as real-time and the full position snapshot as an hours-scale picture, not a per-second one. Arkham’s own rate-limit guide states 100 requests/second on Standard endpoints and 1 request/second on Heavy endpoints (transfers, swaps, flow queries, intelligence search, HyperCore trades) — high query throughput for investigation workloads, though Arkham does not publish a specific data-refresh cadence for entity labels or flow graphs that we could verify.

API design & integration

SmartMoneyAPI is plain REST with a consistent JSON schema across endpoints, tier-based daily and per-minute caps, and a composite call like /v1/confirm or /v1/whale-consensus returns a blended read in one request. Arkham’s Intel API is also REST, metered per call by credit weight (Standard vs. Heavy endpoints, above), and uniquely offers x402 pay-per-request in USDC with no account or API key at all — useful for one-off agent queries where a subscription doesn’t make sense. Our terms (§8.3) grant personal or internal business use on every tier, including powering your own bots and apps and showing derivative analysis to your end users, but not redistributing raw output; we make no claim about Arkham’s own licence terms here.

The verdict

Many teams use both: Arkham to attribute and trace, SmartMoneyAPI’s /v1/confirm to gate the live entry. They answer different questions.