A few months ago nik posted an excellent article — Picking Out Microcaps 101. — with a process for microcap hunting. I’m lazy so I wanted to make the process as easy as possible. My solution was to use a combination of CoinMarketCap’s API and Google Sheets to make the first step in the process — weeding out shitcoins — easy.

With the API we can quickly load all coin data into a spreadsheet and filter out high marketcap, high coin supply, low volume coins.

Using an API in Google Sheets is easy so no worries if you’re not technical. I’ll explain everything below. Eventually you need to put in honest work to subjectively evaluate these coins but this should help you get there.

Setting up Google Sheets

First thing you’ll need to do is create a new Google Sheet doc so head over to Google Drive and do that (top-left corner).

In order to use an API in Google Sheets you need to use the Script Editor to create a custom function that takes an API URL (we’ll get that later) and returns the data you want in the form of JSON (doesn’t really matter to know).

Go to Tools > Script editor:

From here, add a new Script file so go to File > New > Script file and give it the name “ImportJSON”:

You should have a page like this:

You’ll want to delete everything in the ImportJSON file so it’s completely blank:

Go to this pastebin link, copy everything from there, and paste it into your ImportJSON file. It should look like this:

It will have a lot more lines than this

If what you’re seeing makes no sense that’s OK because we’re done here. Just make sure it’s saved (File > Save)

Getting CoinMarketCap Data

Now we get to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We’re going to use the ImportJSON function we created to call CoinMarketCap’s API and populate our spreadsheet with all the data. Head back to your spreadsheet, and in the first cell type this: