How NairaRate Collects, Cleans and Dates Its Rates
A transparent look at where the numbers on this site come from, which checks run before a rate is shown and what the site does when a source fails.
Rate sites ask you to trust numbers you cannot check. The least we can do is explain what happens between an exchange and the figure on your screen. This page describes how NairaRate works today. If anything here stops being true, the page will be updated.
Where the numbers come from
NairaRate reads publicly available data from five sources:
- Bybit, OKX and Bitget, peer-to-peer boards. For each one we request the best offers on both the buy and the sell side.
- Quidax and Luno, instant services. Here we read each service's quoted ask and bid price.
The official USD/NGN reference figure comes from a separate public exchange-rate feed. It is displayed for context only and is never used to compute a buy or sell price.
How a request works
All the sources are asked at the same time rather than one after another, so the page is only as slow as the slowest source. If one of them times out or returns an error, it is simply left out and the rest of the board is unaffected. We do not invent a replacement number for a source that did not answer.
The checks before anything is shown
- A sanity window. A price outside a realistic naira range is treated as a broken feed and thrown away, not displayed as a bargain.
- Sorting the sides by price, not by label. Exchanges describe buy and sell from different points of view, so we do not trust their labels. On a working board, the side you pay more on is the buy side, so that is how we assign them.
- A direction rule. After sorting, the buy price must be at least the sell price. If a source comes back the wrong way round, it is turned over. Skipping this would produce a negative spread, which would tell someone to sell at the buy price, the most expensive mistake a tool like this could make.
- Cleaning merchant names. Unreadable or broken names are replaced with a neutral label so the table stays legible.
How fresh the numbers are
A fetched board is kept for about 90 seconds. Within that window, visitors see the same stored result instead of triggering a new request to every exchange each time. The page shows how old the data is, and the counter on the page keeps counting so the label does not claim "4 seconds ago" twenty minutes later.
If every source fails at once, we show the last board that worked, clearly marked as older, rather than an empty page. A rate from a few minutes ago with its age printed beside it is more useful than nothing, as long as it is honest about being old.
The daily snapshot
Once a day per source, the site records the best buy and sell price it saw. Over time these snapshots form the rate history. The record only grows from the day collection starts, and gaps are shown as gaps.
What this approach cannot do
- It shows only the top few offers on each board, not the whole order book.
- It cannot see offers hidden by a payment-method or country filter.
- It is not a quote: nothing here reserves a price or guarantees you can trade at it.
- It depends on public endpoints, which exchanges can change without notice. When that happens, a source may disappear until we adapt.
How to judge any rate page
These questions apply to NairaRate and to every other site:
- Does it say where each number came from?
- Does it show when each number was fetched?
- Does it separate P2P offers from instant quotes?
- Does it show limits, or only headline prices?
- Does it tell you what it cannot do?
- Is there a way to report a wrong number, and does anyone answer?
Questions we get
Why does my exchange app show a slightly different number? Our data can be up to about 90 seconds old, and the app may be filtered to a payment method or amount that ours is not. See why rates differ.
Are the exchange links paid placements? The links on the exchange cards are plain links to each exchange's public pages. The board's order is based on price, not on a sponsorship.
Can I trade on NairaRate? No. We do not hold funds or execute trades. We help you decide where to look.
Corrections
If a number on this site looks wrong, tell us which exchange, what you saw and roughly when, using the contact page. We would rather fix the source of the problem than quietly change a figure by hand. The principles behind that are in our editorial policy, and the reading habits that go with this data are in how to read a USDT to naira quote.