Rail-class architecture
The five quote classes Opta routes every price through, and how each one is audited.
Orderbook
For centralized exchanges, we depth-walk the public orderbook for the source–destination pair. The quote is the volume-weighted price at the requested amount, not the top-of-book mid.
- Examples
- Binance · Coinbase · Kraken · OKX · Bitso
- Audit cadence
- Daily
- Variance threshold
- 0.5% (see thresholds table below)
Corridor
For fiat-to-fiat routes, we pull the published rate cards of the corridor leaders, the banks and remittance operators that publish indicative rates for a given source–destination pair.
- Examples
- Wise corridors · Remitly · Western Union published rates
- Audit cadence
- Daily
- Variance threshold
- 0.3% (tighter, fiat rate cards should be predictable)
Curve
For DEX routes, we request a quote from the on-chain router (1inch, LI.FI) at the requested input amount. The quote includes routing across pools and reflects realistic slippage on the curve.
- Examples
- 1inch · LI.FI
- Audit cadence
- Daily
- Variance threshold
- 1.0% (DEX curves move with liquidity depth)
P2P
For peer-to-peer routes, we sample published offers on the platform's order page filtered to the same source–destination pair, payment method, and amount range.
- Examples
- LocalCoinSwap (only audited P2P source today)
- Audit cadence
- Daily
- Variance threshold
- 1.5% (P2P offers carry counterparty premium)
Benchmark
Reference rates that are not directly executable but anchor what a reasonable corridor rate looks like. We use these to inform the variance bands but never rank them against executable quotes.
- Examples
- Wise (the rate, not the execution)
- Audit cadence
- Reference only
- Variance threshold
- n/a (benchmarks are not audited against themselves)
Variance thresholds by rail class
We don't apply the same variance bar to every rail. A 1% miss on a DEX curve quote means something different than a 1% miss on a CEX orderbook. The thresholds below define the cutoff for "sufficient" execution per class.
| Rail class | Tight (≤) | Expected (≤) | Flagged (>) |
|---|---|---|---|
| CEX | 0.50% | 1.50% | 1.50% |
| Fiat | 0.30% | 1.00% | 1.00% |
| DEX | 1.00% | 2.50% | 2.50% |
| P2P | 1.50% | 3.00% | 3.00% |
| Benchmark | n/a | n/a | n/a |
Note: numbers above are placeholders pending server-config wiring.
Quote union
Internally, every price in the engine is one of five variants:
- orderbook
- A depth-walked CEX quote.
- corridor
- A bank-corridor card rate.
- curve
- A DEX router quote (1inch, LI.FI).
- p2p
- A LocalCoinSwap offer match.
- benchmark
- A reference rate (Wise), not executable.
Treating these as distinct keeps the comparison honest: a benchmark quote never competes with an orderbook quote in the receive ranking.
Cadence and freshness
We audit each tracked pair daily. New variance rows publish within minutes of each daily run.
Quotes from provider APIs are cached briefly to avoid hammering rate limits; stale quotes are refetched when a comparison runs.