In one of the bigger cryptocurrency acquisitions that has been seen recently, Binance — controversially — announced it would be taking on one of the world’s most popular crypto data sites, Coinmarketcap.com. This deal was rumoured to be worth $400 million, but its greater implications were much more talked about.

There are concerns of a conflict of interest as coinmarketcap is intended to be impartial and provide unbiased information about coins, projects, and indeed exchanges. However, now with Binance at the helm, there is an opportunity for the exchange to have access to the data.

More than that, the exchange is also able to access data provided by other projects and exchanges, and even help bolster coins that it is involved in or takes a passing interest in. The claims from Binance, and indeed its enigmatic leader Changpeng Zhao, are that they will remain independent though.

In what appear to be the first steps of Coinmarketcap under Binance, Zhao has taken to Twitter asking the community what it feels should be bettered, added, or improved upon with Coinmarketcap.

“Listen-to-community time. What would you like to see improved, added or removed from @CoinMarketCap,” he tweeted.

Work to be done

The question was met with a variety of responses with many people finding a lot of issues with Coinmarketcap and wanting Binance to address them.

Charlie Shrem, well known for his work in the early days of crypto and the founder of early crypto exchange BitInstant, stated: “Alot,” before adding, “But it’s still great right now.”

Others requested the removal of “scamcoins,” greater efforts to combat fake exchange volumes, and new pages dedicated to tracking active addresses and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.

There were some users who used this opportunity to point out the issues of having Binance running an impartial site.

“But I thought you weren’t going to influence anything and they were continuing to operate independently? That looks long,” one user tweeted.

Will Binance make CMC better, or worse?

There is indeed a lot of work that needs to be done on CMC for it to really break out and be a go-to site for market data. It has reached great heights currently, but not without its own controversies, especially relating to market volumes and trading volumes.

The question is whether Binance will make it a better platform or the concerns about its influence will rise up and damage the reputation of the site even further.