Dec 27, 2020
Coingecko AMA with Bobby Ong
Brief Information
CoinGecko provides a fundamental analysis of the crypto market. In addition to tracking price, volume and market capitalization, CoinGecko tracks community growth, open-source code development, major events and on-chain metrics. Our objective is to elevate crypto participants’ understanding of fundamental factors that drive the market.
Introduction AMA
Eric: Welcome Bobby!!
Bobby: Thank you for having me Eric!
Eric: We will open the group for questions in a bit. First, please introduce yourself to the AMA room crowd. Do tell us how you got into crypto.
Bobby: Hi everyone, I’m Bobby Ong, co-founder of CoinGecko. Since 2014, CoinGecko has been the trusted source of information for millions of cryptocurrency investors.
Our mission is to empower the cryptocurrency community with a 360-degree overview of the market. CoinGecko provides comprehensive information derived from thousands of data points such as price, trading volume, market capitalization, developer strength, community statistics, and more.
We currently track more than 6,500 tokens from more than 400 exchanges.
Bobby: I first heard about Bitcoin in 2013 shortly after I graduated with a degree in Economics from University College London. I was teaching myself how to code and spent a lot of time in programmer forums. All these programmers were talking about this new magic Internet money called Bitcoin and I got curious. Before I know it, I started digging through the space and fell into the rabbit hole.
Started doing some trading and then I realized there was a lot of data that I needed that was not available. Met my co-founder, TM Lee and we both decided to build CoinGecko to do a better job with data analytics and tracking. That’s how CoinGecko was born 😊
Eric: Cool story. Where is coingecko based? Hows the crypto scene over there?
Bobby: CoinGecko is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The whole team is here. We have a team size of 12 now. In Malaysia, the government is actually quite progressive. They recently gave 3 companies exchange licenses — Luno, Sinergi, and Tokenize Xchange. They are also drafting IEO regulations now and will soon go live.
Eric: That’s great to hear. What has been the main challenge running coingecko so far?
Bobby: That’s a good question. Trying really hard to think which is the biggest challenge because obviously there many haha
Eric: Haha. Take your time
Bobby: Hiring is one of the harder challenges I would say. It is not easy to find someone who is interested in the blockchain / cryptocurrency industry in KL. We need the right candidate with knowledge or strong interest in crypto and also with the right technical skillset — software development, market research etc. But more importantly we look really hard for people with the right mindset, attitude, and cultural fit to grow CoinGecko to the next level.
OPEN FLOOR AMA
Q: Does Coingecko provide an API? If yes is the Coingecko API used for commercial purposes? #Coingecko
A: Yes, most definitely! Our API is used by many providers such as wallet providers (Metamask, MyEtherWallet, MyCrypto, Trezor, Trust Wallet, Electrum), block explorers (Etherscan, Blockchair, Cosmostation), data aggregators (Masternodes.Online, Dapp.com, DappRadar), media (BlockTV, Forklog), and many more! 😊
Q: Coingecko has been expanding its role to be more than just a pure ranking site and to give some analytics and reports on general trends. Will we be seeing more of this? Also is there any plans to monetize for high numbers of api calls ?
A: Yes to both. We will be doing more awesome things in the crypto data space as this industry is moving so fast! It’s really hard for us to keep up with things.
We have some plans for a premium API in the future but not anytime now as we believe the market is not ready for it yet
Q: I use CoinGecko daily for checking price & updates ! There are many features like Mobile application & coins detailed info! But, what’s next? Which next feature we can see in coingecko? #coingecko
A: Thank you for being our loyal user! We will be doing some stuff in the DeFi space and you will hear about it really soon. A lot of big plans for 2020! 😊
Q: How many coins and tokens are there in Coingecko? Can I check the market of the coin or Token on Coingecko?Can I check the chart on Coingecko for the bot on the telegram?#Coingecko
A: At this point in time there are 6788 coins/tokens on CoinGecko. We track 407 exchanges. You can get token data by sending a message to our bot @coingeckobot
Q: Hello and thank you for your explanations. I think you currently have a big competitor: Coinmarketcap. What are your strengths that would determine your success in spite of CMC?
A: We have crypto derivatives! https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/derivatives
https://www.coingecko.com/en/derivatives
And Trust Score of course!
https://blog.coingecko.com/trust-score
https://blog.coingecko.com/trust-score-2
Q: Do you plan to provide APIs to allow for querying and fetching your historical data?
A: Yes we have that in our API. You can see the full specs at coingecko.com/api
Q: Year-End Report seems to be the specialty of CoinGecko. So, why does Coingecko team spend so much time and works on it? Do you believe the things that you receive will be worth for it?
A:We find it really hard to stay updated in the crypto space. We want to help educate the crypto users on the knowledge that we have acquired and digest things simply so that we can all learn together. We believe that this space needs to be approachable for it to grow bigger and reach its potential. Thank you for reading our report. It puts a smile on our faces whenever people read and learn from our report!
Q: How does the team generate revenue for the project development?
#CoinGecko #AmaRoom
A: CoinGecko’s business model for now is advertising. At some point we will launch API. We are now launched our Store so feel free to support us at http://store.coingecko.com/
Q: In a market full of shit coins, how do you help your users stay aware of so called shit coins and scam tokens? Who are your partners for continued success?
A: If there are proven scams and reported by financial authorities worldwide, we will remove the token. For any tokens/exchanges with warnings from users, we will put up a warning message to warn others to be careful.
Q: Ever wanted to challenge Tradingview? build out features around charting and such?
A: Hahaha yeah, if unlimited resources, for sure!
Q: how much traffic do you have now per month? whats the growth ratE?
A: We do about 12.5 million pageviews in January. The growth rate is actually highly correlated with Bitcoin price. So as price goes up, our traffic goes up as well
Q: How can you compete with Coinmarketcap?
What is the difference between Coingecko and Coinmarketcap?
#Coingecko
A: There are a lot of questions on CMC so I will address this.
We have been around since 2014 and are as old as CMC in this industry. We are doing our best to stay updated with the fast-moving crypto industry. We believe our data is much more accurate.
CoinGecko is the most comprehensive cryptocurrency database, tracking over 6,500 tokens and over 400 exchanges. CoinGecko also tracks cryptocurrency derivatives markets — https://www.coingecko.com/en/derivatives
CoinGecko has Trust Score which looks into exchanges bid/ask spread, ±2% orderbook depth and other factors to solve the fake volume problem. CoinGecko also has a free API used by many companies such as Etherscan, Trust Wallet, MyEtherWallet, Metamask, and many more: https://www.coingecko.com/en/api
Lastly, CoinGecko publishes an in-depth cryptocurrency report each quarter. You should take a read on our report each quarter: https://reports.coingecko.com/all-reports
Q: When better UX/UI? https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/ I must say this is a far better list than what is found in CMC?
A: Absolutely! We really can’t stand looking at all the shit exchanges at the top of CoinGecko last year and knew we had to do something to fix the situation. Our solution is Trust Score. We are constantly looking to improve it and will push out a minor update really soon to make it more robust! Coming soon. We hired our first UI/UX designer 3 months back and he is slowly improving CoinGecko bit by bit :)
Closing Remarks
Eric: Ok, That ends our AMA with Coingecko! Awesome one.
Bobby, please invite everyone to join your official channels
Bobby: Thank you very much everyone for the questions. They are really good quality questions! I am really pleasantly surprised you all asked really good questions.
Come join us in our community:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/coingecko
Telegram: @coingecko
You can continue asking us more questions and we would love to have you join us! 😊
