CoinMarketCap vs. CoinGecko: Choosing Tools to Analyze Crypto Markets

Services that aggregate data from the cryptocurrency markets are some of the most demanded tools for day-to-day analytics among investors. Such services provide information about the state of the market, prices and market capitalization of assets, exchange trading volumes, listed coins, and trading pairs.

Over time, they introduce more functions and refine the methods of calculating particular metrics. Therefore, despite the seemingly identical abilities, there are significant differences between such analytical services.

We compared the leading market analytics platform CoinMarketCap and its main competitor CoinGecko.

Popularity

According to SimilarWeb, in February, CoinMarketCap (CMC) website was visited 37 million times, compared to CoinGecko’s 8.33 million.

Total visits for CMC and CoinGecko websites. Source: SimilarWeb

Both services’ monthly traffic is growing. Although, CoinGecko isn’t growing as fast as CMC and has less than a quarter of the big one’s user base.

SimilarWeb’s report shows the traffic dynamics of CoinGecko and CMC from March 2019 to February 2020.

Website Analysis & Insi… by ForkLog on Scribd

CoinMarketCap was also recently acquired by the leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance. The deal may lead to a significant traffic increase for CoinMarketCap. Given Binance’s financial resources, the service may also get a boost in terms of development.

As for the respective mobile apps, the usage rank metrics of CMC and CoinGecko aren’t that different.

SimilarWeb’s Usage Rank metric for CMC’s and CoinGecko’s apps. Source: SimilarWeb

This may have to do with the fact that CoinMarketCap released its app in April 2019, while CoinGecko did that almost a year earlier.

CoinGecko also has a slightly higher Google Play rating: 4.7 against CMC’s 4.3.

To be fair, there are other services similar to CoinGecko and CMC, such as Coincap.io, Coinpaprika.com, Cryptocompare.com, and Livecoinwatch.com, they get many times fewer visitors than the leaders of this segment.

Crypto-Asset Ratings

Top-10 assets on CoinGecko as of March 28th, 2020. Source: CoinGecko

CoinGecko offers filters allowing users to sort assets by a set of criteria. Conveniently, for each asset, the table shows the ticker and the price dynamics for the last hour, 24 hours, a week, and 30 days. You can also see the Total Supply volume (not the same as Circulating Supply representing the number of coins released into the market).

CoinMarketCap has a different default view showing only the 24-hour price change, but the Full list mode shows all the other metrics as well.

CoinMarketCap’s list of the top assets by market capitalization shown in full mode. Source: CoinMarketCap

Notably, CoinGecko lists OKEx’s OKB token as 10th, while CMC has given the same place to Tezos. It is likely that one of the services had an incorrectly set Circulating Supply parameter.

Exchange Rating by Volume and Liquidity

The problem of representing the real exchange trading volume is still not completely solved, despite the efforts of many projects. There are often discrepancies in the data from different sources and sometimes small platforms get to the top lists.

CoinMarketCap has three versions of ratings for exchanges:

Top 100 By Adjusted Volume includes volumes of spot trading platforms where there is no zero-fee trading and Trade-to-Mine mining model, which involves rewarding active traders with tokens.

Top 100 By Reported Volume includes volumes of all spot trading platforms regardless of the trading models they use.

By Liquidity sorts all platforms by liquidity.

Top 100 By Adjusted Volume list. Source: CoinMarketCap

In the list on the screenshot above, the top list includes less-known platforms, while Binance is listed 16th.

Top 100 By Reported Volume list. Source: CoinMarketCap

In the Top 100 By Reported Volume list Binance is leading, but two somewhat obscure platforms BKEX and MXC are competing for the 2d and 3rd places.

Calculating the liquidity involves a lot of factors, such as market order sizes and order-book depth changes and distance from mid-price. Market pairs are polled at random over 24 hours and the average results are then used in the calculation.

According to CoinMarketCap’s chief strategy officer Carylyne Chan, liquidity is the most important metric for investors and traders. CMC’s support section lists several key takeaways regarding liquidity:

The more liquid the market, the easier it is to buy and sell an asset.

Volume alone is not an effective indicator of a market’s liquidity, due to volume inflation by several cryptocurrency exchanges since 2017.

Liquidity is a more relevant metric for quickly identifying the most liquid markets for the crypto-asset a user wishes to trade.

CMC’s Liquidity ranking. Source: CoinMarketCap

The list of platforms by liquidity includes the most popular exchanges, so it may be a better representation of the actual state of the market than the volume-based metrics describe earlier.

CoinGecko approached the problem of trading volume misrepresentation by introducing the Trust Score metric based on normalized trading volumes in 2019.

The method behind Trust Score involves analyzing the web traffic and order book spread, as well as Bitwise’s data for 10 trusted exchanges.

Top-10 platforms ranked by Trust Score. Source: CoinGecko

It is apparent that CoinGecko’s list differs from that of CoinMarketCap. The rating by Bitwise largely corresponds with CoinGecko’s list.

Exchanges ranked by daily Bitcoin trading volume. Source: Bitwise

Unlike CMC, CoinGecko doesn’t have a separate section for liquidity ranking. The metric is shown for each platform individually:

Binance liquidity overview. Source: CoinGecko

Reported and Normalized trading volume and their ratio, as well as the average spread between the bid and ask prices are also displayed here.

Individual Asset Data

In terms of presenting the information about individual coins, the two services also have substantial differences.

CoinMarketCap’s page for Bitcoin. Source: CoinMarketCap

Aside from the general information about the coin, trading volume, supply, links to block explorers, source code, technical documents, and price chart, CMC offers the list of trading pairs with BTC and historical data about the price and market cap.

For those interested in fundamental analysis there is a section with on-chain metrics by IntoTheBlock and data from the Fundamental Crypto Asset Score (FCAS) ranking system by Flipside Crypto.

CoinGecko’s page for Bitcoin. Source: CoinGecko

CoinGecko’s page isn’t lacking information either. Namely, it includes:

The general information about the asset and its underlying technology, market data, capitalization, domination index, trading volumes, and peak extremes for the last 24 hours;

Trading volume to market capitalization ratio;

An option to vote in line with one’s expectations regarding the future price;

An option to show candlestick chart from TradingView;

Onchain indicators by IntoTheBlock;

Social network activity (Social tab);

Developers’ activity on GitHub (Developer tab);

Code for embedded widgets, links to informational resources, and a news feed;

A list of platforms and trading pairs with the coin in question (Markets tab);

The countdown for the next reward halving.

CoinGecko also has certain information that isn’t represented on CMC, namely the development and social media activity stats, news, and links to educational materials.

Derivatives

CoinMarketCap’s Derivatives section. Source: CoinMarketCap

While CMC’s Derivatives page is straightforward, CoinGecko splits it into two tabs: Products and Exchanges. The products tab shows data for perpetual swaps and futures in separate lists.

CoinGecko’s Derivatives section with the list of perpetual contracts. Source: CoinGecko

Aside from the usual metrics like trading volume and price, this section shows:

Price change for 24 hours;

Index price based on data from several spot exchanges;

Basis, representing the difference between the spot price and the futures price of the base asset;

Bid-ask spread;

Funding Rate;

Open Interest.

In this section, CoinGecko provides more information than CoinMarketCap.

Crypto-Lending and Decentralized Finance

CoinMarketCap shows interest rates on deposits and loans for individual coins and services, both centralized and DeFi.

CoinMarketCap’s Interest section. Source:CoinMarketCap

CoinGecko shows just the interest rates for deposits.

CoinGecko’s Earn section. Source: CoinGecko

Although, there is a simple calculator to estimate growth per month, year, 5 years or 10 years.

Miscellaneous Features

An interesting feature of CoinMarketCap is the historical snapshot with rankings of the top assets in the past.

CMC’s Historic Snapshot section showing Top-10 crypto-assets by market capitalization as of May 4th, 2013. Source: CoinMarketCap

Evidently, a lot has changed since then, except for Bitcoin domination.

CoinGecko has its Compare section to compare coins.

CoinGecko’s Compare section. Source: CoinGecko

Here users can compare prices, capitalization, supply, price dynamics, and other parameters of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum.

Conclusion

Both services have their pros and cons.

CoinMarketCap has a minimalistic interface but a narrower set of functions. CoinGecko offers more metrics and sections but lacks a subsection with crypto-lending interest rates and something similar to CMC’s Historical Snapshot page.

Still, both services are worth considering and may be used simultaneously for maximum use to investors.

Written by Alexander Kondratiuk

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