CoinGecko’s Bobby Ong on his trends for 2024 and why gaming is his “dark horse” for the year

The cryptocurrency data aggregator’s co-founder and COO on CoinGecko’s genesis, its evolution and why gaming will play a major role in its future

Navigating the uncharted territory of web3 can be tricky, so it’s a blessing that we have some guiding lights out there. One of the landscape’s most reliable beacons is Bobby Ong, who scrutinizes the crypto landscape every which way. He sees the big picture and the zoomed-in picture. He cuts through the overblown claims of the hyperbolists with cold, hard facts. And he communicates what he observes through his website CoinGecko, the largest independent cryptocurrency data aggregator out there.

Bobby’s path towards this unique position in web3 culture began over a decade ago. An economics graduate, his interest was piqued by a now very famous whitepaper from the hand of a certain Satoshi Nakamoto. With that, he had Bitcoin on his mind.

“Back in 2013, I was learning how to code through online courses, and I spent a lot of time in tech forums — Hacker News in particular. I remember seeing articles getting to the front page of Hacker News talking about this new form of money called Bitcoin. Usually, the Hacker News crowd are early in trends and I thought that either these guys are crazy, or they’re onto something. I bought my first bitcoin peer-to-peer on LocalBitcoins, a marketplace that no longer exists, from some random stranger online. I sent him money and hoped the Bitcoin would arrive. It did!”

Evangelizing for cryptocurrency

But Bobby’s passion for Bitcoin wasn’t just about personal gain. He was fascinated by the wider application and cultural significance of this new form of currency, which promised to undercut the possibility of “governments and banks freezing your account”; which offers “fast and cheap transactions, even on a Sunday afternoon”; and for which the supply group is not determined “by some committee somewhere”. He decided he had to spread the word about this new form of currency and to carve out a career path for himself based around it.

After batting various ideas back and forth with his co-founder TM Lee — CoinGecko’s CEO — they decided to pursue a data site because, quite simply, “there’s always a need for good quality data.”

CoinGecko launched back in April 2014 and the site has evolved according to the crypto landscape and to its users’ needs. “We only had twenty coins back then,” says Bobby. “But we weren’t just tracking the price. The idea was to give a 360° view of the crypto market. Over the years, we simplified CoinGecko to what the users wanted: to get a view of the universe of coins in the market.”

Tracking the trends with cold, hard data

What CoinGecko’s users want has evolved over the decade since its inception. “This industry is so dynamic, so vibrant and things move so fast. To stay relevant, we have to know the latest trends, otherwise we’ll be behind the curve,” says Bobby. “Just keeping up with crypto is a full-time thing. But that’s what makes it fun. Even though it’s 10 years, it doesn’t feel like it was 10 years at all.”

Bobby ranges over the evolution of the cryptocurrency industry, from Bitcoin to proof-of-work tokens like Litecoin, onto the game-changing arrival of Ethereum, the advent of ICOs and eventually the defi wave — “suddenly anyone could provide liquidity for a token, which opened up, decentralized and democratized trading” — and onto the impact of L2s, Solana and Cosmos. A personal mantra for Bobby is “anything that can be tokenized will be tokenized” and he sees tokens “being launched at a faster and faster rate”. It’s this proliferation of small cap coins — and the users who want to keep an eye on them — that drove the development of GeckoTerminal, which tracks every new token that comes out. If CoinGecko has 12,000 coins, GeckoTerminal has 2 million.

The rise of gaming: CoinGecko’s big trend for 2024

With Bobby’s experience of crypto’s evolution, when he says that gaming is his “dark horse” for 2024, you’d better sit up and take notice. “Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into gaming studios to build web3 games in the past few years. It takes a few years to build a Triple-A game — so now all the investments are starting to bear fruit,” Bobby says. “All we need is just one game to become a big hit and suddenly we have millions of new users using crypto. I don’t know which game or when but it’s not a matter of ‘if’ — it’s a matter of ‘when’.”

So with CoinGecko approaching its 10th anniversary, it might well be time to add some brand new features. “As more games start putting their assets on chain, we want to start tracking it,” he says. “Obviously it’s going to be a challenge because there are multiple different games, multiple different chains, multiple different standards, but that’s what makes things fun.”

Echoing a point we explore in depth in one of our ‘Web3 Gaming Revolution’ articles, on true digital ownership, he continues: “With a lot of games at the moment, they’re all off-chain assets owned by the company and they could rug you anytime, removing your skins or swords or whatever you have in the game. I think all these assets are most likely going to be tokenized as NFTs, while the coins can be fungible tokens. We’ve seen a few different games doing it and I think it’s just a matter of time before more games move to the [model of] fungible/non-fungible tokens and on-chain assets. It makes for an interesting challenge for us to see how we can help track the crypto gaming industry better at CoinGecko.”

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