About
What Finance Foundation is, why it exists, and the rules it holds itself to.
Finance Foundation is an open data and intelligence layer for global finance. It structures financial knowledge — companies, markets, assets, funds, banks, jurisdictions, indicators — into typed entities with stable identifiers and explicit relationships, and publishes all of it as both a website and an open API.
The premise: financial information is abundant, but financial structure is scarce. Prices stream everywhere; clean, linked, machine-usable knowledge about what things are and how they connect remains locked in licensed terminals. That connective layer is what we build — open by default.
The product principle: don't build another financial website — build the foundation underneath financial applications. Every feature must make Finance Foundation more useful as infrastructure; anything else is out of scope.
What this is — and is not
It is
Reference data · a knowledge graph · open identifiers and schema · structural research · an open API · an agent-readable knowledge layer.
It is not
A price feed · a news site · a broker · investment advice · a real-time terminal. Figures are approximate, versioned (seed-0.7 · marketcap-1 · 2026-08-30) and honestly labeled.
Methodology in one paragraph
Entities are selected by systemic importance per class. Figures come from public primary sources, are rounded to reference precision, dated, and pass a raw → normalized → enriched → audited pipeline before publication (details). Identifiers follow open standards (LEI, ISIN, MIC, FIGI, ISO 4217); the entity/relationship model is the open FF Schema, CC BY 4.0.
One layer sits on top of that seed and is refreshed on a schedule rather than at release: a live macro and markets layer (crypto, FX, policy rates, yields, CPI) pulled every three hours from open sources. Every value is stamped with the source, the observation date and the retrieval time on every page and in every API response, and carries the upstream provider's terms rather than ours — the full register is at /sources. A delayed equity quote layer from Twelve Data was removed in September 2026: its free tier does not permit publishing the values to third parties, which is what a public page and a public endpoint do.
The Foundation Network
finance.foundation is part of a network of open educational sites on the foundations of modern computing and finance: banking.foundation (banking infrastructure), pedersen.foundation (commitments), garbled.foundation (secure computation), vdf.foundation (verifiable delay), zksnark.foundation (zero-knowledge proofs), tee.foundation (trusted hardware).
Contact
Partnerships, data, early API access: admin@digitaldomains.market