The Importance of CMC Ranking

as indicator to a blockchain project success

Ardor Coinmarketcap Ranking April 18, 2020

This week Ardor dropped out of the top 100 projects on CMC for the first time since I can remember. Except for my bruised ego, what does it mean for the project?

Let’s put it upfront, the CMC ranking is important, the higher you are in the ranking, the better your chances of getting listed by some services, being chosen as the selected platform by new projects, getting mentioned by publications, satisfy whoever bought your token and in general taken seriously in the blockchain industry.

Why we dropped below 100? My short answer was explained by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930

“The Market Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent”

Longer discussion below

You can say there are projects who are listed in the top 100 and there are others who make excuses and you are probably right. Just in case, my excuses are listed below.

One of our biggest supporters known as Jorrit summed it up nicely in a Tweet but let’s set aside the technical laser focus, which is true, the founders of Jelurida are programmers and they like to code, there is no arguing about that, it is not necessarily a disadvantage as the founders of Google, Microsoft, Intel and many other successful startups were also programmers.

Yes we are technical people, as a result I think we have one of the best blockchain platforms out there and gets better all the time. In fact in the next few weeks we are going to release a new version of Ardor which is the most important upgrade since we introduced the Lightweight Contracts in 2018.

I also think we are doing a decent job in marketing. Consider the Website/Wiki/News Letter/Weekly Wins/Twitter/Promotion programs and the number of publications talking about Jelurida/Ardor which is no less than any of the other “Nxt spin off” projects people often mention as our competitors.

Also consider that dozens if not hundreds of projects that were doing better than Ardor/Nxt in the past are dead or dying and that many of the projects listed above us are not really blockchain infrastructure projects. It’s therefore somewhat unfair to compare us with the ones who survived and somehow managed to get better ranking.

Then we made a wrong bet back in 2018, we assumed that public blockchains will become a mainstream infrastructure product, but this did not materialize (yet?). You see, we built Ardor as a platform for deploying public blockchain projects but out of hundreds of projects with whom we discussed child chain implementation last year, none was able to pass through a relatively wide filter we placed for validation.

To summarize, CMC ranking is important but having a leading product developed by a functional company with clear vision is no less important.