Rate limits

Limits are per minute and enforced in Redis. Every response carries three headers:

X-RateLimit-Limit: 60
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 42
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1789891900

Over the limit you get 429 with { "error": "RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED" }. Wait for X-RateLimit-Reset (Unix seconds), then continue. The limiter fails open if the store is unreachable: a store outage never turns into a client outage.

Buckets

Anonymous traffic is keyed by IP. A key is keyed by the key and gets the plan’s limit. Some families are read-heavy by nature and have their own, larger per-IP buckets, so a page that fans out on load cannot starve a swap from the same address.

Bucket	Applies to	Anonymous limit
Default	/quote, /swap, /arc/*, /rh/*, /lp/*, /smart-money/*, /points/*, /ask/*, /bridge2/* and everything not below	60 a minute per IP, or your plan with a key
Data reads	GET /tokens*, /portfolio/*, /market*, /stream/*	300 a minute per IP
Logos	GET /logo/*	3,000 a minute per IP
Bridge polling	GET /crosschain/status	240 a minute per IP
Exempt	/ws/live upgrades	own connection and channel caps

The Ask agent adds its own guard: 8 questions a minute per caller, and a daily token budget for the deployment (GET /v1/ask/status shows it).

Staying under

• Poll boards at 10–30 s and token pages at 5–10 s; the answers are memoised server-side, and polling faster returns the same bytes.
• Use /v1/ws/live for candles, trades and Arc prices instead of polling /tokens/chart and /tokens/trades.
• One /arc/tokens?limit=500 beats 500 token calls; one /tokens/stats/{address} beats four windowed calls.
• Cache /tokens?chain= (the curated list) for an hour.
• Quotes are the expensive call. Quote on user intent, not on every keystroke; the fast=1 frame exists for the first paint.

Capacity, not rate

Two endpoints cap concurrency instead: /v1/stream/market at 500 clients and /v1/ws/live at 500 connections with 8 channels each. Both answer 503 when full. Reconnect with backoff.