Trying to Find the Best Analytical Tool for Crypto: Coingecko or Coinmarketcap

With the rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the platforms for aggregating data on crypto markets are highly-demanded instruments. They rapidly develop, incorporating new features over time and improving the methodology of estimating specific metrics. Such platforms are numerous; CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko are the most representative and widely adopted among them. Let us make a comparative analysis of these instruments.

CoinMarketCap is a popular website for tracking crypto assets' prices founded by Brandon Chez in May 2013. CoinGecko is a CoinMarketCap alternative, cryptocurrency price, and information data platform founded in 2014 by Bobby Ong and TM Lee.

Both CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko provide information on the state of the market, prices and market capitalization of available assets, as well as exchange volumes, trading pairs, and a series of metrics that are essential for investors to know.   

Popularity

Let’s start a comparative analysis of platforms with their popularity. By some estimates, in October, the CoinMarketCap website was visited 29,55 million times, compared to 22,06 million for CoinGecko.

The graphs above show the traffic growth of both services, although to a lesser extent for CoinMarketCap compared to CoinGecko.

Also, recently CoinMarketCap was acquired by the leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance. The bargain may lead to a significant increase in traffic for this platform.

Crypto Asset Ratings

CoinGecko offers filters allowing users to sort assets by different criteria. For each asset, ticker and price dynamics are shown for the last hour, 24 hours, and a week. The total supply volume, different from circulating supply which represents the number of tokens released to the market, is also shown.

CoinMarketCap shows only the 24-hour price change, but the List mode also demonstrates all other metrics.

Both tools have almost identical ranking lists with some minute price differences possibly due to the different price indicators.

Classification Of Exchanges By Volume And Liquidity

The task of representing the real exchange volume is not yet complicated, although the industry has made numerous efforts in this regard.

Last year CoinGecko drew attention to this problem when it brought to light the difference between reported and adjusted volumes for the vast majority of assets by exchanges, a technique called Trust Score, which CoinMarketCap later emulated.

The Trust Score method includes analysis of web traffic and order book spread, as well as Bitwise data for ten trusted exchanges.

CoinMarketCap has three systems of ratings for exchanges:

1. Adjusted Volume includes volumes of spot trading platforms where zero-fee trading and Trade-to-Mine mining models are absent and active traders are rewarded with tokens.
2. Reported Volume includes volumes from all spot trading platforms, irrespective of their trading models.
3. All platforms can also be classified by liquidity.

Undoubtedly, liquidity is the most essential metric for traders and investors. In the process of its calculation, the market pairs are haphazardly probed over 24 hours, and then the average results are used. The more liquid the market, the easier it is to sell and buy an asset.

It is clear that the evaluation of exchanges on both platforms differ; CoinGecko's ratings partially correspond to Bitwise's listing. Unlike CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko does not provide a separate section for liquidity rating. This metric is displayed for each project individually, including reported and normalized trading volume, and the average spread between the bid and ask prices.

Individual Asset Data

Two platforms present information related to individual assets quite differently.

CoinGecko displays a large amount of relevant information regarding the particular cryptocurrency:

• Background information about the asset and its basic technology, market information, capitalization, domination index, trading volumes, and extreme outliers of the last 24 hours;

• Trade volume at market capitalization ratio;

• An opportunity to vote by one's expectations of future price; 

• An option of displaying the TradingView candlestick chart;

• IntoTheBlock chain flags;

• Social network activity (Social tab);

• Developer activity on GitHub (Developer tab); 

• Code for built-in widgets, links to web resources, and a newswire;

• A list of platforms and trading pairs with the considered currency (Markets tab).

Also, CoinGecko shares certain information that CoinMarketCap does not include such as statistics on social networks, links, news, and educational materials on the specific project.

Besides general information about a particular currency, its trading volume, supply, links to the block explorers, source code, technical documents, and price charts, CoinMarketCap presents a list of trading pairs with BTC and historical data on the market capitalization and price.

Derivatives

By contrast with CoinMarketCap whose Derivatives page is simplified, CoinGecko divides it into two tabs: Exchanges and Products. There are separate lists with data for futures and perpetual.

In addition to the usual metrics such as trading volume and price, this section displays a wealth of information ranging from open interest to financing rates. This section of CoinGecko's platform looks superior to its CoinMarketCap's counterpart.

Crypto Loans And Decentralized Finance

CoinMarketCap displays loan and deposit interest rates for individual currencies and services, both centralized and decentralized.

CoinGecko displays interest rates on deposits, with an interactive calculator to estimate growth by month, year, five, or ten years.

Other Features

CoinMarketCap has a remarkable feature such as the historical snapshot with rankings of the key assets in the past.

CoinGecko has a Compare section where users can compare different parameters of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum such as price dynamics, supply, capitalization, and prices.

Conclusion

Each platform is good after its fashion and has certain merits and flaws. CoinMarketCap features a more modest interface, but not so spacious infrastructure. CoinGecko has more different divisions and figures, although it does not have, for example, a subcategory with a list of credit rates and its version of Historical Snapshot, like CoinMarketCap. 

That being said, both platforms are noteworthy and mutually complementary, benefiting traders, and investors.