Just got dumped?

We all know the feeling: you read an article promising wonders, getting all pumped up and then…

Well, the one thing that nerds love, data, is helping to solve this social problem when it comes to getting dumped in the world of alternative currencies.

In an era of numerous altcoins, deciding which ones are a buy, sell or hold can become an arduous task for an individual. Thankfully, your life is about to become a lot easier thanks to CoinGecko.

What is CoinGecko?

CoinGecko is cryptocurrency ranking and evaluation site that breaks down quantitative and qualitative data for a number of different metrics. The metrics used include items such as Twitter followers, Reddit subscribers, coin community, the cost of a 51 attack, the number of developers working on the coin and much more to provide an overall score of the coin and a rating for each category.

You would not believe all the meticulous sorts of data that can be used to determine a coin’s value. No need to do that though, CoinGecko illustrates this data in a clean user interface and nice graphs and now CoinGecko has an alpha version of their dashboard (below).

The story of CoinGecko starts with its founders, Bobby Ong and TM Lee. Bobby is a University College London Economics graduate while TM Lee is a Purdue University Computer Science graduate. At UCL, Bobby learned all about financial stability and prevention of bank runs with federal deposit insurance schemes. However, as Bobby saw with Cyprus in 2013, “the trust between government and savers can be broken when depositors are forced to take a haircut on their savings.”

This one incident got Bobby thinking about Bitcoin and how there is some sort of inherent “underlying utility to this sort of digital asset.” But after getting involved in Bitcoin, Bobby got lost in a sea of altcoins.

Bobby and TM, like a lot of people, read some articles about this and that altcoin, and they bought some coins on “gut feeling” without doing much research.

“Some purchases did well, but some did pretty bad.”

Bobby learned more about trading strategies on cryptocurrencies and found that there are “several fundamental reasons why certain altcoins may hold good value in the mid/long term. The basic idea goes along the line of technical innovation, community strength and developer team.”

Dogecoin, what a joke Bobby once thought: “Who would buy into a me-too copy with dogs.”

What Bobby failed to realize was that Dogecoin had a great community supporting it and developers working hard to see it succeed.

“I decided to dig deep into the Dogecoin community numbers and found out that they are pretty impressive. Looking at the Dogecoin subreddit and how active the community members there, I became an instant Dogecoin convert and started mining Dogecoin myself.”

Realizing what he had missed out, it came to him.

“I thought that it would be a good idea to collect all this information to rank and benchmark other cryptocurrencies.”

Bobby went to his friend, TM who had also missed out on the Dogecoin phenomena and they decided to give this idea a whirl. Since then the two have been making better trades.

“We wanted to help people make more quantitative decisions before buying cryptocurrencies and help provide a 360 degree overview by looking at a lot more metrics.”

Since CoinGecko launched in April it has already gotten a lot of positive feedback on Reddit and bitcointalk forum. It was already a top post on the Dogecoin reddit thread. The interface is easy to use with information presented clearly.

There is still a lot going on for CoinGecko; they are adding new coins and metrics every week to get a more comprehensive view of each coin compared to others. Maybe they will even add live charts to make it the perfect investment tool, but hey, who knows?