Reading through the entire Coinbase Cloud page and even going into the Coinbase Cloud Exchange docs (https://docs.cloud.coinbase.com/exchange/docs) doesn't make it clear what this offers over Coinbase's current API.
The difference of those two docs is one is coinbase.com, their more retail oriented option (picture robinhood), and pro.coinbase.com which is a more advanced trading platform (think or swim or other more mature investor platforms). The fee structures are different, order types, visualizations, etc (even though they likely use the same infrastructure for both) and they segregate a user’s accounts between the two (though you can freely transfer between the two).
Another major difference is on the retail platform you’re not going to see an orderbook - just a price.
All that to say, I think the main difference is access to more information about the overall market, more advanced orders, better pair selection (that usually eventually ends up on the retail platform), and the more mature financial platform.
These new docs replace the previous pro/prime API docs and extend it into new products.
The cloud product/label is where they intend to build out a suite of service offerings. API wasn't broad enough to encompass what they intend to do next.
Hi, Joe here, heading up Coinbase Cloud. tldr; this is our first step in providing a full set of API based services to build crypto applications and unifying the existing APIs that exist.
Importantly, this will go well beyond interacting with Coinbase existing products and provide tooling needed to make it easier for developers to build new web3 applications.
These new docs replace the previous pro/prime API docs and extend it into new products.