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What is the crypto blank in OpenCues?

Type btc _ and the _ becomes BTC: $78,542.00. The crypto blank fetches live USD prices from CoinGecko's free public API: no key, no signup, fifteen coins covered out of the box.

What you type

Each supported coin has both its ticker and its name as keywords: bitcoin/btc, ethereum/eth, solana/sol, plus Cardano, Ripple, Dogecoin, Polygon, Polkadot, Avalanche, Chainlink, Uniswap, Litecoin, Binance Coin, TRON, and Shiba Inu. The keyword must lead the sentence your _ ends. Keyword expansions render the short ticker as the friendly display name while you navigate.

Where the data comes from

CoinGecko's simple/price endpoint, which requires no authentication on the free tier. Each keyword maps to CoinGecko's slug-style coin id (btcbitcoin, maticmatic-network); an unrecognised keyword is treated as a CoinGecko id directly after sanitising, so coins outside the shipped list are still reachable if you know their id. Prices are cached for 60 seconds per coin.

Formatting and behaviour

  • Prices over a dollar get commas and two decimals ($68,432.50); sub-dollar coins get four decimals so doge _ doesn't round to nothing.
  • Read-only: cycling is a no-op. Refresh by typing a new _.
  • The ticker is embedded in the answer so it reads standalone after the command span clears.
  • With the optional blank-context-mode on, BTC and ETH are exposed as ambient tokens, so phrasings like how is bitcoin doing _ route through the catalog without the exact keyword.

The honest caveat is inherent to the source: it's the free public CoinGecko tier, so it's subject to that API's availability and rate behaviour. Errors surface visibly in place (bitcoin: HTTP 429), never as a silent gap.

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