Alpaca’s Crypto Market Data Stream that is provided in the paid plan is extremely slow to update, as there is hardly any trades taking place on this exchange.
wss://stream.data.alpaca.markets/v1beta3/crypto/us
What are people using as a url_override to stream higher volume of crypto trades? Even if the dat stream is something external to anything Alpaca provides, has anyone been able to successfully replace this url that is used in the CryptoDataStream.py class?
Examples and general tips would be much appreciated, as the default crypto stream is not useful to me at all with the low amount of trades that are taking place. For example BTCUSD used to trade dozens of times at least every minute from the old crypto stream. Now I have 5 trades after 20 minutes for BTCUSD.
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Hey 
The main question is what you’d like to use the trades for. If you want to trade on the Alpaca exchange and want to know the current price, I recommend using quotes (or even bars).
Hi! I currently use Trades, but I’ve seen quotes and bars, but I don’t understand the difference quite yet other than a Trade is actually executed, and a Quote is just an offer. But I still would like my Pattern Trading Algorithm to run off real changes in price, which I believe only happens with real trades? I could be wrong possibly just do to my own lack of understanding but I appreciate any advice also for sure!
I’m not familiar with the “Pattern Trading Algorithm” and googling it didn’t yield any good results.
I don’t understand the difference quite yet other than a Trade is actually executed, and a Quote is just an offer
This is correct, a quote is the current best bid & ask on the Alpaca exchange and the trade is the actual execution. However, the quote still can be used for tracking price movements. Why? Firstly, the quotes show the price range where trades could happen on our exchange. And secondly, trades actually do happen within that price range on other crypto exchanges, and those trades ultimately affect our quotes.