The case for slow crypto data.
In a world where values jump up and down by the minute, there is a clear need for slow, benchmarked crypto data. Meet Coincheckweekly.

Early April, after finishing a temporary assigment for a Crypto Investment Fund in Amsterdam, I sat down with a friend for coffee. Two hours later I walked out with a ready-made plan for a start-up without a name, that would compile and provide weekly blockchain project data to traders and hodlers on what was really going on underneath all these price swings (thanks, Herman — you are the best!).
Answers to basic questions like: what are the developments when looking at the number of transactions per second, how are the fees keeping up, are the communities growing or declining and is that more or less compared to the average developments, what was the rank of a project last week, are more or less people visiting the projects’ website amongst others should be made clear by a simple but meaningful table that would be distributed every week through a free newsletter — with extra data available at a paid version.
After five months of hard work, we are finally ready to launch our weekly crypto data newsletter: Coincheckweekly. Thanks to Ivan (Serbia), Ahmad (Belgium) and Edwin (The Netherlands), we are ready to launch the weekly reports that people can use to keep track of crypto developments.
The journey up to this point was interesting, sometimes bewildering. When we started, we thought that the numbers would be easy to find, ready to be compiled. And that is true, if you limit yourself to data on price and marketcap. When it comes to communities, transactions and fees, that is a different story.
Regarding communities: there seems to be a strange effect, that centralized projects seem to have a larger audience compared to decentralized ones. This is largely an artefact: no one has to guess what Ripple’s Twitter-account is for instance, but with Bitcoin? There are so many, which ones should be included and which ones left out? Some Bitcoin Facebook accounts seem to have switched to Bitcoin Cash, how to label the subscribers of that particular page?
Transactions are a world apart. At first, when blockchain was introduced, a transaction meant a financial transaction, where value changed hands. Then came assets pegged to blochchains, and meta-level functionalities like offers to buy or sell at a certain price-level. With the arrival of feeless blockchains, the question on what a transaction was, kind of flipped around: what *couldn’t* be a transaction? So a cancelled sell-offer or a chatbox-message or a temperature sensor-output are all considered transactions these days. While that may be true, we think that some might be more equal than others and with that realisation comes the mission to provide clarity to our members on the developments of ‘real’ and zero-value transactions for the larger projects.
Some blockchain statistics turns out pretty hard to find. Even if a dashboard or explorer is there, it can still be impossible to determine what happened in the last 24 hours. Personally I love data, and when I ask admins on Telegram for data on transactions/day for instance, and they reply with ‘keep the faith, brother’ (I am not kidding, this happened several times) I reply that I have all the faith in the world, but still would love to see the numbers at the same time to check if my faith is still aligned with reality.
Am probably not the only one who got it wrong from time to time, really believing in a project that was unfortunately only sinking deeper and deeper. Hope our data can help you keep track of things in an easy way!
Others experts advice me to develop an API or just process the whole blockchain to find these really basic performance metrics. We’ll do just that.
So all the data we use is in principle publicly available, but in practice it does cost an amazing amount of time and energy to gather it, throw out the unlikely numbers and errors and compile it into something useful.
An essential part of what we do, is benchmark the data for you. How does that work and what is the value in the domain of cryptocurrencies? Especially when many aspects of blockchain projects are quite volatile, a benchmark creates a stable point of reference that helps you to define which coins outperformed the market last week (or not).
Please be careful not to take these results as investment advice, we have no opinion on what people should or should not do with regards to crypto investments. We just think that it might make sense to keep an eye on performance metrics for people who are interested to follow the developments in this domain.
So I hope many people can profit from the work we do!
Get your own slow crypto weekly at Coincheckweekly and subscribe to the newsletter for your weekly update!
Please give us your feedback below on what we can do better.
