Everything on this page is free. No credit card, no trial that turns into a bill, no paid upgrade required. Two accounts, about five minutes total.
You need these because Accrual Scanner analyses assets on your behalf, using your own free allowance at the data providers. Nothing you do here is shared with other users, and nothing here is charged to you.
| Key | Required? | What it does | Free allowance |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoinGecko Demo | Yes | Market data and the 90-day supply history used to measure real net emission | 10,000 call credits/month · 100 requests/min · 1 key |
| Groq | Optional | The LLM arbiter that resolves ambiguous revenue models | 1,000 requests/day · 200,000 tokens/day · no card |
One analysis costs about 4–5 CoinGecko calls. Ten thousand calls a month works out to roughly two thousand analyses — far more than anyone runs by hand.
You can start with CoinGecko alone. The scanner works without Groq: asset tiers are computed in Python from measured numbers, never by a language model. Groq only helps decide which revenue model an ambiguous protocol uses.
Why CoinGecko is not optional. Without a key, the supply-history endpoint
rate-limits almost immediately. In our own testing, emission could be measured
for 5 assets out of 440 without a key, and 433 out of 436 with one.
Assets whose emission cannot be measured are marked unmeasured and receive
no tier — the scanner never guesses.
Go to https://www.coingecko.com/en/api/pricing
Scroll past the paid tiers (Basic $29, Analyst $103, Lite $399) to the section headed “Try before subscribing?”. Under Demo · $0/month press Start for Free. It says No credit card required, and that is accurate.
Do not press Subscribe — that button belongs to the paid tiers.
Enter your email and a password, then confirm your address from the email CoinGecko sends you. If the message does not arrive within a minute, check spam.
After signing in you land on the Developer Dashboard. If you don't, go to https://www.coingecko.com/en/developers/dashboard
Click + Add New Key. Give it any name you like — accrual-scanner works. The dashboard will show you the key.
The Demo plan allows one key per account. If you already use a CoinGecko key elsewhere, that same key works here — but the 10,000 monthly credits are then shared between both uses.
Copy the whole string. Treat it like a password: it identifies your free allowance, and anyone who has it can spend it.
In Accrual Scanner open Settings → Data keys, paste the key into the CoinGecko field, and press Save.
You should see it change to ••••• followed by the last four characters. That is the confirmation it was stored. We never display the full key again.
Skip this if you only want the tier data. Add it later at any time.
Go to https://console.groq.com
You can register with Google, GitHub, or an email address. No payment details are requested on the free tier.
Open https://console.groq.com/keys — the API Keys section of the console.
Click Create API Key, name it accrual-scanner, and confirm. The key begins with gsk_.
Free-tier limits are generous for this purpose: 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day. One analysis uses at most a couple of requests.
Groq shows the key once. If you close the dialog without copying it, the key cannot be recovered — you simply delete it and create another. No harm done.
Settings → Data keys → Groq → Save.
| Situation | What you see |
|---|---|
| No CoinGecko key | The shared Top-1000 table, history and comparisons all work normally. Analyse refuses and links back to this page. |
| No Groq key | Everything works. Ambiguous revenue models are marked needs_review instead of being arbitrated. Tiers are unaffected. |
| Both connected | Full functionality. |
The shared snapshot is built on the server and costs you nothing: the Top-1000 table, the history, the change panel. It is there whether or not you ever connect a key.
CoinGecko requires anyone using their API to display “Powered by CoinGecko”. We show it at the bottom of every page, so you do not need to do anything — but do not be surprised to see their name there.
If you would rather not store a key with us at all, you can still use every part of the product except Analyse.
"Invalid API key" right after saving. A trailing space is the usual cause. Re-copy the key and save again.
"Rate limit exceeded". Either you exceeded 100 requests in a minute — wait sixty seconds and retry — or you have spent this month's 10,000 call credits. The monthly allowance resets on your billing date at CoinGecko.
The key worked and then stopped. Check that it still exists in the CoinGecko Developer Dashboard — keys deleted there stop working here immediately.