CoinGecko is one of the popular cryptocurrency data aggregators, which provides data on more than 7000+ cryptocurrencies and 400+ exchanges. Founded in 2014, the platform has achieved great reputation by providing accurate market data, developing tools for better analysis of the current market situation, own API and more. Today we are happy to talk and learn interesting facts about CoinGecko with Bobby Ong, COO of CoinGecko.
Hi Bobby, we’re happy to be interviewing you! At the moment, CoinGecko is the main alternative to CoinMarketCap. Can you tell us how CoinGecko is different from CMC?
CoinGecko is much better in many respects. Here are some reasons why CoinGecko is better:
CoinGecko is the most comprehensive cryptocurrency database, tracking more than 7,000 tokens from over 400 exchanges
- CoinGecko is the most comprehensive cryptocurrency database, tracking more than 7,000 tokens from over 400 exchanges.
- CoinGecko tracks the cryptocurrency derivatives market and has one of the most comprehensive sections amongst data aggregators.
- CoinGecko uses our Trust Score algorithm to sort exchanges and overcome the rampant wash trading issue. Trust Score looks into exchanges’ bid/ask spread, ±2% orderbook depth, web traffic estimates, and other factors.
- CoinGecko has a free API that is used by many companies such as Etherscan, Trust Wallet, MyEtherWallet, Metamask, and many more.
- CoinGecko also publishes in-depth cryptocurrency reports each quarter. Here is the latest Q1 2020 report.
As far as I know you have your own API for obtaining data, unlike many other crypto aggregators. We would want to know more about this, since you always provide independent and accurate information.
Indeed, our API is very popular and simple to use. The crypto community appreciates that we provide it for free. We view it as our responsibility to the crypto community to grow this industry and by providing an easy-to-use API, we hope to encourage more people to develop this ecosystem and have a richer user experience by having these crypto data made available to users. This API is also used by many crypto researchers to look into the market performance and we are very happy to provide it.
What features or tools are you working on right now if you can share these details? On our news site about SmartCash and Bitcoin Confidential we use widgets from Coingecko, which are so useful to crypto users that they don’t even have to go to another tab.
There are several things which we are working on. Some of the key initiatives that we are looking at is to have coverage in all cryptocurrency data. This includes having coverage in leveraged tokens/ETF that has been offered by many exchanges and also options data.
We also look to improve our Trust Score by rating more aspects of exchanges to give a better evaluation of exchanges and we will be adding several different measures to improve this.
Your methodology for calculating market capitalization is very accurate, unlike other crypto aggregators that do not follow their own rules and have opaque criteria. What are your criteria for determining this data?
For Proof-of-Work coins like Bitcoin and Litecoin, we take the coins that have been mined and use that as the circulating supply.
For tokens issued on an existing blockchain such as the Chainlink token which is a token issued on top of the Ethereum blockchain, we take the total supply and deduct locked tokens held by Company, Team, Investors and so on. Here is how it looks for Chainlink:
For more information, you can read our methodology.
On CoinGecko users can always find the most actual information about the trading volume. Can you tell us more about TrustScore for exchanges?
Trust Score is an algorithm that we launched in May 2019 to change how exchanges are ranked on CoinGecko. We are the first data aggregator to do so thereby providing a solution to the rampant wash trading and fake volume issues plaguing the industry.
We cannot stand looking at all the exchanges with fake volume appearing at the top and decided that trading volume is no longer a good indicator for exchanges’ liquidity. We needed to use other metrics and decided that factors such as exchanges’ bid/ask spread, ±2% orderbook depth, web traffic estimates could be good measures to determine exchanges’ real liquidity.
This way of measurement seems to be working well as exchanges ranking at the top are the large exchanges instead of small exchanges with fake volume. We are constantly looking to improve this algorithm as exchanges will try to manipulate things. More factors will be added to Trust Score soon to make it more robust.
SmartCash and Bitcoin Confidential teams want to express gratitude for the excellent work you have done over time. We regularly use CoinGecko Beam to notify our users about updates, this is the place where users always can find up-to-date information on trading volumes and other data.
We thank all of you for the support shown to CoinGecko! We will do our best to always improve and ensure accurate data is shown to users all the time.
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Coingecko Web: https://www.coingecko.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/coingecko
SmartCash: https://smartcash.cc/
Bitcoin Confidential: https://bitcoinconfidential.cc/
Coinlance: https://coinlance.com/
Coinlance on Twitter: https://twitter.com/coinlance_news
