Unchained - Why CoinMarketCap Launched Its Liquidity Metric - Ep.147

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

Carylyne Chan, chief strategy officer at CoinMarketCap, and Gerald Chee, head of research, discuss the history of CoinMarketCap, why the founder Brandon Chez initially focused on circulating supply to calculate market cap, how the ICO craze has changed the way CoinMarketCap defines circulating supply and how the kimchee premium on the Bitcoin price in Korea at the end of 2017 is influencing the future direction of the website. We cover why CoinMarketCap is branching out into other areas such as metrics, blockchain explorers, hosting conferences and more, how the site has made money historically, the demographics, geographical distribution and behaviors of users on the site, and how CoinMarketCap's web traffic is 90% correlated to the Bitcoin price. We talk about the fake volume problem, how CoinMarketCap decided to address it with a new liquidity metric, the new Data Accountability and Transparency Alliance they formed, and why they are working with some of the exchanges identified by Bitwise as being the most egregious in faking volumes, and how those exchanges fare when it comes to CMC's new liquidity metric. We also cover some of the other ways companies have tried to address the fake volume issue, how CoinMarketCap tries to identify the "true price" for any cryptocurrency (and why USDT makes this hard), and what the circulating supply of Ripple should be. Thank you to our sponsors!  Kraken: https://kraken.com/ CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unchained Crypto.com: http://crypto.com/ Episode links:  CoinMarketCap: https://coinmarketcap.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/CoinMarketCap Carylyne Chan: https://twitter.com/carylyne Gerald Chee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerald-chee-8340a0161/ History of CoinMarketCap: https://blog.coinmarketcap.com/2019/05/01/happy-6th-birthday-data-alliance-block-explorers-and-more/ Incident in which CoinMarketCap shaved $100 billion off the total market cap of crypto assets when Chez decided to remove South Korean exchanges from its calculations: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-programmer-at-the-center-of-a-100-billion-crypto-storm-1516708800   CoinMarketCap's new interest for crypto loans  page: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/43460/coinmarketcap-now-publishes-interest-rates-on-cryptocurrencies-allowing-users-to-compare-and-choose Bitwise report on fake trading volume: https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-nysearca-2019-01/srnysearca201901-5164833-183434.pdf The 10 exchanges Bitwise says have real volume: https://www.bitcointradevolume.com/ CryptoCompare Q3 Exchange Benchmark Report: https://www.cryptocompare.com/media/36569367/cryptocompare_exchange_benchmark_2019_11pdf.pdf DATA: https://coinmarketcap.com/data-transparency-alliance/  Messari benchmarks: https://messari.substack.com/p/more-reliable-cryptoasset-benchmarks Messari report on Ripple’s “circulating supply”: https://messari.io/article/messari-research-ripple-s-market-cap-is-likely-overstated-by-6-1-billion Ripple’s response to Messari report: https://www.coindesk.com/xrp-market-cap-may-be-overstated-by-billions-messari-report-estimates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. If you enjoy Unchained or Unconfirmed, my other podcast, which now features a weekly news recap after every interview, please give us a top rating a review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Cipher trace cutting-edge cryptocurrency intelligence powers anti-money laundering, blockchain analytics, and threat intel. leading exchanges, virtual currency businesses, banks, and regulators themselves use cipher trace to comply with regulation and to monitor compliance. Crypto.com get their app and buy crypto at true cost with no fees or markups. Get a metal MCO visa card with up to 5% back on all your spending. Want more? Download the crypto.com app today. Cracken is the best exchange in the world for buying and selling digital assets. the tightest security, deep liquidity, and a great fee structure with no minimum for hidden fees.

Whether you're looking for a simple fiat on-ramp or futures trading, Cracken is the place for you. Today's guests are Carolyn Chan, Chief Strategy Officer at Coin Market Cap, and Gerald Chi, head of research there. Welcome, Carolyn and Gerald. Hey, Laura. Thanks for having us. Hey, Laura. Nice to be here. So there's probably no need for a huge introduction, but why don't we start with the most basic question, which is what is coin market cap? Yes. So coin market cap is basically the place you go to when you want to find information about cryptocurrencies and crypto exchanges. So last year, we had about 125 million users and 3.6 billion page views ending the year with those numbers. So I think it's been a really interesting right from when Coin MarketCap started in 2013

up until today in the last six years. And how did you each come to work at Coin MarketCap and what do each of you do there? Sure. I will start and Jarrow can go. So I, before Coin Market Cap, I founded and sold a company in the artificial intelligence space. So I really like emerging technologies. Someone told me to read more about blockchain. at that point. So I'd heard about Bitcoin before in 2013, again, 2015. So I was very interested and that's how I got into it. And I somehow managed to meet the founder of Coin Market Cap.

So I believed in the vision that he wanted to bring forth. And that was to showcase the crypto revolution to the world. And so I decided to join the team. So right now at Coin Market Cap, I started doing marketing and now I'm the chief strategy officer that, basically, helping to shape that vision to something that we can execute and also to bring coin market cap to more people around the world. And Carolyn, before we move to Gerald, I just need to know. You said somehow you just happened to meet. Brandich has the founder of coin market cap, which doesn't happen to pretty much anybody. So how did that happen? How did that happen? It is interesting to me because it happened to seven degrees of connection.

So it was like someone put on an email chain and someone wanted to look for someone who could help someone and so forth. And then it somehow landed up in my inbox. So when I went to New York for an event, I just decided to ask Brandon if he would like to meet. And he agreed. So it was interesting for me at that point to meet him. Oh, and just wait. And was it that you were looking for a job or that he was looking to hire? No, I think he was actually looking to expend to Asia, and I happened to be in Beijing at that time. So I wanted to have a conversation with him about that, like how I could help him there or whether there was anything that we could collaborate on. So that was why we met in New York.

Okay. All right. Well, we're going to talk more about this mysterious Brandon Chess in a little bit. But Gerald, why don't you tell us what it is that you do at Coin Market Cap and how you came to work there? Sure, sure. Right. So before coin market cap, I started my career as a trader. I was trading bond futures derivatives, trading market neutral strategies at a prop trading firm. So what I did was arbitrage between bonds in the US versus bonds in Australia, bonds in Germany, and stuff like that. So that was how I started off as a trader. I entered the cryptocurrency space about one and a half years ago, sometime in late 2018, when I was looking at Bitcoin futures as a trading product. So that's how I founded hashtag Capital with four or three other people. We started training Bitcoin futures as our main way of generating income. And one of our LPs was Brendan Chess himself. So we were doing a pretty good job. And he was having some problems with his side in terms of pricing algorithms, as well as the volumes that we are saying, inflated volumes.

So he kind of asked us, hey, you guys are doing a pretty good job in this trading space. Could you also help me in this? in this way because we also had, with all our infrastructure in place, we had algorithms and pricing methodologies that took all into account to get better pricing for our trading strategies. So he acquired us, hashtag capital, the four of us went on board the Coin Market Cap team five months ago, sometime in late July 2019, and we have been there since. So what I do at Coin Market Cap is basically try to fix the problems that surface on the site in terms of pricing and in terms of inflated volumes. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, we're going to talk a lot about those issues later on. But first, let's talk a little bit more about the history of coin market cap, which Carolyn alluded to a little bit. You mentioned that the site got started in 2013. How did it get started and what was the initial mission? Yes. So I think it really started as a site project for Brandon. So he wanted a way to value all kinds of cryptocurrencies. So he saw they were quite a few of them coming up and he wanted to compare them versus Bitcoin, compare them versus each other. And so he built the projects on the site. And so I think he really grew out of that in the last couple of years from 2013 when

he really wanted to just solve his own problem until today where I think that mission has grown bigger, where we really want to help to bring more discoverability and more efficiency to the crypto markets. And what had Brandon been doing before? He was a developer. But not in the trading space, right? He didn't have a financial background. No, yeah.

Okay. Yeah, well, can you also explain how Brandon decided to focus on market cap and how he defined that as circulating supply? Yeah. So I think that when we started, Brandon really wanted a quick way for people to understand what they were comparing. And so he borrowed the market cap term from traditional finance. And he also borrowed volumes. He also borrowed public float. But in the context of crypto, he actually popularized the term circulating supply. So I think with those in mind, I think the rationale was if people understand

already what market cap, volume, and public float were, they would be able to quickly get a sense of what he was trying to present on the site. And I think that made it really intuitive for people to understand the numbers that they were looking at. And even from the start, I feel like the phrase circulating supply was a little bit difficult in the sense that it wasn't always a clean definition for each of the coins. Can you talk about why it was? difficult to use that term for the calculations? Yeah, I think when we look at supply right now today, there have been changes over time, right? So for example, with supply, how we define it right now is anything that is freely tradable by users. Basically, if you are able to buy it off the open

market, you would be able to count that in the supply. Whereas if it was being locked up or it was privately allocated things that were not possible for anyone to get their hands on. It would be not circulating. Therefore, they would not be part of the circulating supply. So I think over the years, some things have changed, for example, how do you account for state tokens, for example? Those tend to be challenges that the team faces. So I think something that we're also working on other than the current definition, which is

our team looking at the, block explorers, ensuring that we check with the team multiple times, what they are being used for, where the tokens are, which wallets they're held, rich list, and so forth. Going forward, we will also be doing more research to verify that more quantitatively. So, Gerald, I think if you want to also add on. Yeah, sure. So from our studies of liquidity and whatnot in terms of the new liquidity metric, we also see correlations between how it could apply to circling supply, because

in our minds, everything that's circulated should be on the open market. And using our new liquidity metric, we can actually see what's available in the open market and use it to kind of discern whether the numbers reported by the token project is accurate or not. So that's something that we are looking into in terms of data metrics. And that's something that we'll be excited to kind of launch in the near future if there is something there. Yeah, yeah. I'm actually, I had a question for this that we'll probably get to a bit later because it gets a little bit in the weeds. but why don't we just talk about at least one example now because when I started thinking about

this metric, the focus of using this metric for this website, you know, it felt like it definitely made sense for Bitcoin where the circulating supply really was just determined by the monetary policy of Bitcoin where you had this kind of like rapid inflation at the beginning, but then it tapers off, you know, pretty quickly. And it's all just determined by the software. But then it's sort of felt like, you know, once we hit the ICO era, it definitely became apparent how that the focus of, you know, circulating supply didn't make as much sense. And here's just one example, which is that. So, for instance, right after the NOSIS crowd sale, I wrote about the token. And they did what was called like a Dutch reverse auction where they were intending to sell,

they just wanted to sell, or sorry, they just wanted to raise $12.5 million. But then due to FOMO, they ended up selling only 4% of their tokens at $29 apiece. And so that little chunk was the $12.5 million. But then when it hit exchanges, the price jumped from $29 to more than $300. So then suddenly the market cap for this brand new project was $140 million. But then the thing is, that was just based on the 4.2% that they'd sold, right? So if you looked at the total amount, then suddenly, like, nosus would have been worth $4 billion when it, like, had barely even done anything. And so it just felt like at that point, like anybody coming to coin market cap would have made a bad decision based on, you know, this concept of what, what the market cap was there, which was

based on the circulating supply. So in general, like, you know, do you feel like it was during that time that during the ICU craze when this became apparent that there were downsides to using this metric? And at that time, did you guys consider changing the emphasis on circulating supply? Yes. So I think at that point in time, we did notice that there were things that could be improved. And I think it's true for many of the things on the site. I'm sure we'll talk more about the other things that we will continue to improve, but specifically for supply, I think that there were many This is like the one that you mentioned for a nosis. And the supply methodology has actually evolved over time,

but has kept the same understanding, which is basically the best approximation for the number of assets that are circulating the market in the general public's hands. So instead of using metrics like total supply or things like that, I think what we're trying to do is basically to show that best approximation. And I think with what, Gero was saying using more of that data-driven metric, maybe using a combination of liquidity and other metrics, we would be able to better solve for this problem in the future in a way that's

fairer and also more transparent to the end user. All right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I feel like maybe that's more of a trading emphasis or something rather than this issue about what the coin is worth overall. So we'll talk a little bit more about that later on. But one other thing that I wanted to ask about during this kind of historical, just to cover the history of coin market cap, I feel like one of the moments when coin market cap became most infamous was in January 2018, when Brandon just without warning decided to remove the activity of Korean exchanges from the prices on the site. And that basically slashed or it ostensibly slashed $100 billion off the total market cap for cryptocurrencies.

At that time, was that just like a unilateral decision by him? Or, you know, did he do that in consultation with anybody? And like, what was behind the decision and how did, you know, that decision-making process happen? Yes. So I think in January last year, we noticed that some of the South Korean exchanges were skewing the side's average figures. So there was something that what people called Kim,

premium. So we actually excluded the exchanges in our price calculations due to the divergence in prices for the rest of the world. But when you say skewing, like why did you use that verb rather than because like, like why is it skewing rather than just part of what the price should be? Yes. So I would just say that. So the main reason why it was skewing was because it was not reflective of free market prices in the sense that unless you have. had access to a South Korean KYC verified account, you would not be able to arbitrage on the difference. So it was not actually something that you could act on, even if you knew that this was part of the global average. So that was the reason why those numbers were excluded from the numbers

that we were showing on site. And I think in hindsight, we definitely should have communicated better. we should definitely have given notice. And I think we actually learned from that lesson to give a lot of advanced notice after that for changes that were made to the methodology or any changes to exclusions in the data. And so at this point, since there is not much of a chemistry premium, if any, I presume that greener exchanges, are they factored back into the coin market cap data or not? they are and they have always still been listed on the site oh but i mean are they factored into the total market cap or not in terms of market cap i think that is not a factor of uh of the of the price of the current exchanges because we factor circling supply and total price as a factor of bitcoin that or itself so whether we include the current exchanges or not it's not a factor but i i do know

that we do have those prices in our in our average as well right now Okay. So if the kimchi premium emerges again, then what will you do? So I think we are trying to devise a way how do best aggregate prices across different jurisdictions. So for example, we have the US exchanges, we have the European exchanges, we have the Korean exchanges, and maybe even Chinese exchanges. So in terms of how we aggregate prices, what we plan to do in the future is to devise a way how we can use every jurisdiction for itself. Let me give you an example. So for the US exchanges, we are now looking at for the regular exchanges, we have Cracken, Coinbase, Gemini, and so on.

So in terms of value of Bitcoin in U.S.D. terms, these exchanges would probably be the most relevant to kind of discern the value of Bitcoin in terms of U.S.D. However, if you now look at the Korean exchanges, you're now looking at BitTerm, you're now looking at upbid, and these are the exchanges that would be relevant for any Korean user that want to find the price of Bitcoin in Korean One. The same could be applied for the,

the Japanese exchanges, if there is, we find that there are capital controls and maybe even the Chinese exchanges if the OTC desk appears to have better info for debt pricing vis-a-vis the Roaming P. So given that sort of data that we have, because we are actually listing all the exchanges around the world, we think that we can have a best price index for every single jurisdiction, and hopefully that could materialize in the near future. Okay, so let me make sure that I understood this. So essentially your goal, it, it if something like the kimchi premium happens again, then you won't erase the data, but it will be primarily in Korean one or something. And so in that way, it's compartmentalized from the other

currencies. Is that what you were saying? Correct. So our aim is to be able to discern where capital controls exist, where different currencies are differently reflected in terms of pricing, and kind of like give the users in that country the best sort of price index for. debt for the use case. Because if a Korean citizen, a Korean citizen wants to trade in Korean one and doesn't want to know the price of Bitcoin in Coinbase, for example, then we would try our best to cater to that use case and try to personalize that use in the future. Okay. And then just to compare it to what you were doing before, where when he removed the Korean trading from the website and it slashed a huge amount off the total market cap for cryptocurrencies,

that's because that was being averaged into the total value of Bitcoin and US dollars. Is that what the difference was? Yes, that's correct. So essentially what happened was because people in Korea wanted to buy Bitcoin more than the people in the States and globally. So what happened was there was a country premium and that caused prices to go a lot higher in the Korean exchanges. And that difference was you could not take action on that because in order to arbitrage the difference between both exchanges, you will need a Korean bank account and a US bank account, right? So to kind of execute the arbitrage.

So we felt that because the arbitrage could not be executed by most users, we decided to remove that kimchi premium altogether from our price aggregation calculation. Okay. Okay, this is super, super, super, super interesting how all of this can affect, you know, this very influential data website. All right, so just a little bit more in the history. you one thing I was curious about was you guys had this conference recently and Brandon did do an interview on stage, but he did it where he was masked and in shadow and his voice was anonymized by a microphone. But why go through all that effort when like his name is out there? It's not like, you know, it's not like Brandon as a student admits his real name. Yes, it is his real name. I think. So it's like he's like trying to be anonymous, but he's not anonymous. Yeah. I think he's not. necessarily trying to be anonymous more than he's trying to be private.

So we respect that philosophically if people want to retain their privacy, that we would let them do that. And Brandon has always been pretty adamant that he would not like to be exposed personally. So especially with the conference recently that happened in November 2019, This was the first time that we had our conference. So he appeared on stage to host a fireside chat with Sunny King, who is actually anonymous, who is the inventor of food of steak. So both of them were in masks and they had their voice modulated.

But at the same time, they managed to get their points across. I think that they still managed to remain influential and they managed to still share their ideas on stage. And I think that's how they prefer it. So, like, we believe that if he would like to be private, just as Sunny would like to be private or any other anonymous creator would like to be private, it's probably best for them to do that because then they can do their best work without having to worry about the fact that they might be discovered or people might stock them or anything like that. All right. So now talking a little bit more about kind of how coin market cap has changed over time, you know, I feel like for a long time it was just Brandon alone. And now you have, what is it, like somewhere in the ballpark of 50 employees? We have about 30 employees now.

Oh, 30. Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay. And so for a long time, coin market cap also kind of was pretty limited in its scope to, you know, price or market cap data exchange volume. And now, you know, just if I look back at all the different announcements of all the new things, you guys are doing, you know, you're branching out into like metrics, you're organizing an industry alliance, you're doing blockchain explorers, you had this new conference. So how, what was the mission originally? And how is it changed over time and, you know, to what it is now? Yeah. I think when it started, Brandon really wanted to solve the problem of how do you compare crypto against each other?

And I think as the site became more popular over time, what happened was coin market cap became bigger than that. Right now, it's in a position to lead with its influence of its voice. So that's actually led to us to realize that we need to do more. And that's why we have the industry alliance. That's why we're doing more in terms of putting out accurate data, making sure that everything can be displayed in a way that, crypto markets are more discoverable, more efficient.

So an example of that, for example, is recently we launched a product called Interest by Coin Market Cap, which is a way for you to figure out where to earn or borrow crypto. And as a result of that, we've actually seen providers that are listed on this same page, starting to look at how they can make their yields better so that they can continue to be more efficient and more competitive against the others. now that they are all being put on the same page. So things like that, as we aggregate more information, as we add more content to the site,

I think the mission for us to make things more discoverable, more efficient globally, will become more and more important because we will keep growing our distribution channels, we'll keep growing our amount of content that we have, and hopefully that will actually drive the industry forward. And historically, how has the site made money and how has that changed over? time. Yeah, the site has always made money from advertising. So we have the banner that you see at the top of the page and banners around the site. And right now we are also experimenting with native advertising as well. So for example, you have the blue buttons that you see on the

cryptocurrency detail pages. We also have a mobile app now. So that's also another avenue. And our second revenue stream as actually the data. So we have a crypto API that we provide as a software subscription service. So we see exchanges, we see wallets, we see products that are using the data from us as part of their own products or offerings. And right now we also have the conference, which is our third revenue stream. And do you have any demographics on your users or site visitors, whether it's, you know, geography or age, yeah. So I think that data is actually quite interesting. For us, when I look at the data, most of our users are in like the 25 to 34 age range,

and about 60 to 70 percent of them are male. So that's kind of the demographics of the site. In terms of geographical numbers, the top for us last year was the U.S. followed by some European countries, for example, Germany, Netherlands, UK, and then fifth place was Vietnam. And I think the other interesting numbers were Turkey was 10th. And we see a country like Venezuela was 33, things like that. And we actually had about 100 North Korean users last year on the site too. Really?

Yeah. I wonder if all hundred of them are Kim Jong-il. But interesting. Interesting. Although I guess you're counting unique users. Now I'm like, I'm stuck on that because that's fascinating. The Vietnam thing was super interesting too. I don't feel like I've heard that much about trading there.

But I did know, you know, obviously Turkey and Venezuela. And then what are like the behavior? that visitors exhibit on the site? Like, you know, can you buy their behavior, segment them out into like the people who are just kind of like compulsively checking the price versus people who are doing like, you know, more sophisticated research versus, you know, that kind of thing? Yes. So for the most part, most people do compulsively check the site.

So I think the average is something like like two to five times a day depending on who the user is sometimes even more. So I think the curve is around the two to five times a J-mark. So that we can tell is still the most popular way of interacting with the site. So about 30% of all the page views are from the main page, but 70% are the long-tail pages, so basically people clicking in. So from about two years before to now, we actually see the number of pages that people look at increase over time.

I think it used to be something like 1.7 pages. Now we're up to about 3.2, 2.7 or so, depending on which period. So I think like that has actually been quite encouraging because we can see that people are actually drilling down to see more and also people are interacting with the tabs on the detail pages more, looking at analysis that we have added, looking at just news, social, and so forth on the site

that we've added within the tabs. So I think it's actually a good thing. And it has informed a bit of our thinking around adding more content within those tabs and allowing users to have a deeper experience. Because then, you know, for the people who are really trying to go deeper and understand more about the space, we should be the one place that they should be able to get that information without having to leave the page for that. Yeah, I'm definitely in the Long Tail Group because, you know, I'm writing this right now and I'm doing a lot of research. So I'm in one of your, I'm in one of your categories.

And I heard you mentioned in another interview that coin market caps web traffic is 90% correlated to the Bitcoin price. I actually, I'm not sure how old that interview is. So is that still true? And if so, like, has that changed over time? Like, is that more common in like a bull market versus a bear market? Or is that consistent between the two? And like, do you think that's a problem? I think, so I remember running these numbers. So we run it once a year at the end of the year. So early on 2013, 2014, 2015, they were all consistently 99%. So when I ran the numbers at the end of 2018 last year, it was 90%,

which means it's gone down a little bit. So I'm sure we will do another one end of this year. So I find that it would actually be, well, generally had something. Yeah, sure. I can't answer that. Because based on my, I have doing some studies as well on my side to the statistical analysis. It's actually quite interesting, right? Because from what I'm saying, I think our traffic is correlated to the volatility of Bitcoin, not so much the absolute returns of Bitcoin.

And that's interesting because we realize that when there's a big bear market or when there's a big bull move on the same day, we'll see a lot of traffic coming in to check the price of Bitcoin. Because that's what people are interested in. The movement of price in terms of how the absolute movement. from a price, whether it's up or down, when price moves, we get traffic and that's, that's something that we have observed. Interesting. All right.

So I know everybody's wondering about this fake volume issue. So we are going to talk about that after a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Today's episode is brought to you by Cracken. Cracken is the best exchange in the world for buying and selling digital assets. With all the recent exchange hacks and other troubles, you want to trade on an exchange you can trust. Cracken's focus on security is utterly amazing. Their liquidity is deep and their fee structure is great with no minimum or hidden fees. They even reward you for trading so you can make

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of Coin Market Cap. So actually, before we get to the Vake Volume, I do want to ask one other question, which is, you know, just to understand how coin market cap works. What is the typical process for a coin or token to get listed both in terms of like what the submitter has to do

and then what coin market cap has to do to get it listed? Sure. I think there are actually two different tracks. One is if you're a project, one is if you are in exchange. So for the projects, what you have to do is basically submit through a form that we have on the site, which is coin marketcap.com slash request, same thing for exchanges, but you go to different tracks.

So for most of the projects and exchanges that list in our site, we actually encourage everyone to look at the methodology page because it tells you specifically, what the listings team was looking for. So what happens is after you submit this form, it asks, like, as you're submitting this form, it asks you things like what this project is about, ask you for uniqueness, attraction, your community, things like that. So these are all things that the team is looking for

on top of the requirements, which is you must have a functional site. It is a crypto, it is traded publicly, and it has a representative from the exchange that, from the project that we can actually speak to if we need to clarify. So that's the requirements for projects. So I find it's pretty straightforward. Some people who have said it takes a long time. It turns out usually that they have not provided all the information that the team is looking for.

And so I would say for all listing requests, you should try to put as much information as possible in that form so that there less back and forth because every time you reply, it goes back to the end of the queue. So that's for projects. And then for exchanges, there are some other requirements that are needed. For example, they must submit a summary endpoint for their API. They must be in operation for at least 60 days. They must have orderbook data that they can submit to us now.

And also like a system status page that shows all the coin listings or details. and so anyone that is actually submitting on the behalf of the exchange, if they have the exchange email, will be prioritized. So I think with all of these, the idea is that we are trying our best to list everything that comes on the site as long as they pass these requirements. And so we want to make sure that we can get everybody on the page. So recently we actually had an update to, methodology to include something called untracked listings.

So even if you don't have markets that we're currently tracking, whether you're a project or exchange, we can still make sure that we put you out as a listing on this site so that you have a page that you represent on Coin Market Cap, and later on we'll add your markets as well. And you wrote this blog post where you mentioned the most common customer complaints. And it was kind of funny, frankly, first was remove exchange. X because it is faking volumes. We will talk about this. I know everybody wants us to talk about this. Sorry, there's just a lot of exposition first. Second, Project X is a scam. Please delist it. Otherwise,

you are aiding and abetting these crooks. Three, please remove our pairs on Exchange X because we do not want our project to be associated with wash trading. And then complaint four. Exchange X has stolen my funds. Please issue an alert. So when you receive these complaints, do you like try to verify them, like especially for you know project X is a scam I did notice that for instance centra tech which the SEC called fraudulent is not even listed anymore on the site and then I just wonder like you know would there have been any point in preserving the history of the trade it's like because it looks to me like you just took it down yeah so we definitely try not to censor any information I think that's actually quite key to the philosophy. So for all of the requests to come in, the team actually goes through

them one by one and tries to verify every single one that happens. So for example, you talk about the scam. So I think scam is one that is really difficult because we're not trying to police any of the projects or exchanges, but we know that we should definitely look into it or issue alerts where necessary. So things like that, the team actually goes through, has gone to talk to local police. They have talked to local authorities to help to verify some of these information that has been submitted for those that have been called a scam. But for the team as well, they have also seen many projects which are not scams that people

have caught scams. And at the start, people even call Bitcoin a scam. So the team is pretty caught. about not making those assumptions. So where there are regulatory alerts or warnings that have been issued, what they do is to put up an alert saying it's been put on this watch list, and please be careful with your funds. And same thing for many of the others.

Like we have received complaints that is really hard to withdraw funds from this exchange. So be careful putting your funds into this exchange, things like that. So I think instead of... So for the Centrotech one, did you just decide to remove it because it was called fraudulent by the SEC? Centrotech, I don't know specifically for that, but there are usually two ways. One is they no longer had any volume, so the team had to delist them based on our delisting policy. Or the other would be, I think that's probably the most, that's probably what happened. And then because we usually don't even, we don't take projects down because people,

do want to see them for posterity. They want to see the history of the project. So the listing criteria does have that. And also unless it was verified as a scam, in which case we would take them down as well. So that nobody would be exposed to that. Yeah. Okay. All right. So let's talk about this Bitwise report. This report came on April and it said that 95% of Bitcoin trading was fake and most of the real trading was just on 10 exchanges. And they even launched this website, Bitcoin Trade volume.com that shows trading volume only on those 10 exchanges. So before the report came out, was coin market, coin market cap aware that such a huge percentage of trading could potentially be fake? I think we started to notice the volume inflation problem last year. So we definitely were

already looking at solutions to this even before the report came out. And what we really wanted to avoid doing in the solution or in our brainstorming of the solution was to not do something similar to that, which is to label something as a good or bad exchange because I think that's binary. Like Bitwise, for example, has also noted that those that have inflated volumes might also have real liquidity on them. So that's one thing that we avoided. And the second thing we wanted to avoid was to use an unscientific kind of correlation, for example, web traffic and volumes, because you could trade by an API key or to also avoid things like simplistic ways of looking at volumes, like fixing an orderbook depth percentage instead of going kind of down to the root cause of the

problem. So we noticed that and we were actively trying to solve it by looking at the root cause of the problem. But the main point was we wanted a solution that could be really objective and would be applicable to thousands of assets because I don't think we're in a position to say we can only focus on 10 exchanges or 10 of the most so-called important projects in the space. So for us, everything that we think about has to be applicable to the thousands of projects that we have to the site and the hundreds of exchanges that we have on the site. that's why it took quite a long time because we had to backtest a lot of data to get to a solution that we currently have. Yeah, I can get something to add, right? So I think when Bitwise launched their report as well as their metrics,

they kind of had the focus of trying to convince the SEC that volumes in the Bitcoin markets was only limited to the top 10. And the way they kind of did that was to use data points from the exchanges, from the auto books, to distill the difference between a legitimate exchange and an illegitimate exchange. And to do that, they focus very heavily on the Bitcoin market pair, Bitcoin USD market pair, and they use that as the baseline to decide whether exchange was washed or not. So the problems with that methodology was that they had to kind of distill their methodology and show their report in terms of the orders being placed on the markets, the trade sizing, the times where orders got executed, they did.

a pretty good job in trying to steal all these different market data points, but the moment they released the report, all the people responsible for the wars trading could see what they were doing and essentially counter game their matrix. And that kind of made the report irrelevant for the next run. They tried to do it. So that's something that we also read in depth and we considered that sort of methodology. But we felt that if you could do something so in depth, and yet when you release the report, people could read it and say, hey, this is what they're doing. Let us try to counter-game it by doing something totally different. And that creates a problem that the war-strain would still be there because the way they excluded exchanges and market pairs

was very systematic. And people could read that methodology and kind of game it. So that's something that we also bore in mind when we design our liquidity matrix to try to not let something as easy as that became. Yeah. Right. And it also sounds like maybe because their report really was focused on trying to persuade the SEC about a Bitcoin ETF that in a way, it's sort of their purpose was just like different from yours because there's was more targeted to this one regulator and you're serving this kind of global audience. So one, you know, thing that came out of it, of course, and like I actually, you know, just not knowing that you had been working on it before the report, it looked to me like you're new,

liquidity metric was maybe in response to their report, but I mean, it just sounds like it was in response to the fact that you know that this was a problem, this fake volume was a problem. So for you, when you were working on this fake volume problem, like how did you define the problem? Did you see it the same way that Bitwise did, where, you know, the wash trading and all that? Or can you just describe how you, you know, saw that problem? And then now also talk about your new liquidity metric and how it addresses that. issue? Sure. Let me try to run through the top process behind the whole liquidity and volumes metric. So I think the first starting point of any discussion in this whole problem is the reason why we

use volumes for ranking market pairs and exchanges. For A, because volumes has been de facto metric that has been used in traditional financial markets. And it's for a good reason, right, because in traditional financial markets, there is heavy, regulatory oversight and it's very difficult for any trader or anybody for the matter to wash trade because that is illegal and they'll be arrested for it and fine for that. So that is not the same for the cryptocurrency space because we have a dichotomy of either you are regulated in the US for example or you're not in Seychos and Malta. And the amount of regulatory oversight for these two exchanges are completely different. And A, you have very strict anti-wash trading measures. B, you don't. But the fact of the matter is,

All these exchanges in the cryptocurrency space matter because they are what makes the Bitcoin markets. It's decentralized and it's something that we have to live with. So if that's something that we have to accept that volumes could potentially be faked because there is a lack of regulatory oversight from exchanges that are located elsewhere of the US, we then need to think about, hey, is volumes the right metric to use? So for kind of like to go down to the basics, what is the use of volumes? if, so volumes mainly used to determine whether there's trading interest. So you see the top 10 active

stocks on the stock markets. You see the top 10 active bonds in the space. So that is one use case for volumes. The second use case for volumes would be essentially to determine liquidity. Because for most parts, most traders want to trade on markets that are liquid. And the best way, without looking at the actual order book, would be to look at volumes if everything was all regulated. So that's what I did last time when I was trading. If I wanted to find a market that was active and that had good liquidity, I'll look at the volumes reported. However, the same cannot be said once you have this regulatory, this deregulatory environment. And that's why we thought about this whole problem at large, right? So the reason why we use volumes on our

site is to distill the liquidity that exists on exchanges and market pairs. So if we wanted to really define what liquidity meant, we then needed to design a metric that measured liquidity. And and not volumes. So that is what we kind of sought to do. And the problems behind showing liquidity as a metric is that, A, it's always changing because all the orders, it's, we're trying to track transactional data that is not done yet. So on one hand, you have volumes that is that tracks transactional data between two traders. On the other hand, you have the orderbook debt, which is orders that are not yet executed in the markets. So debt orders can always be canceled, can always be placed. But the truth of the matter is, in every single market, what

really matters. It's not volumes per se, but it's how liquid markets are. So the more liquid a market is, the more traders you could assume to be trading on there, and the less slippage you get for trading there. So that creates the kind of environment that we want to encourage.

Liquidity is something that we want to encourage people to kind of promote their exchanges. And that's how we decided that liquidity as a metric is best used to serve the interests of both traders and retail users and everyone in this piece at lunch.

All right. Yeah. One other thing that you guys also announced kind of roughly in the same period was the Data Accountability and Transparency Alliance, which has a convenient acronym, which is Data. What does that group do? And, you know, what kinds of problems are you trying to solve with that? Yeah. So in May of this year, we launched the Data Alliance.

So what we really wanted to do with data is to talk about these issues that we were facing. So part of that, obviously, was the volume problem. So what we did with the partners that came on was we asked them for their thoughts on the problem. And when we did our first roundtable with the data aligns, we actually presented the first version of our liquidity metric there. So we talked about the components that would go in there, and we actually got some really good feedback that made it into the final version of the liquidity metric that we see today. So I think that, you know, like one thing would be to provide feedback on things that would impact all of us, but also at the same time with the data aligns, it goes beyond that because we realize that people, like the fact that people were trying to inflate or change the numbers on their end means that we. we just need more transparency or more accountability as a whole in terms of the industry for our data.

So taking responsibility for that, I think we wanted to just rally people around this cause that we cared about, which is transparency. And I hope that with more and more people joining us, we would be able to get a mess of people who cared about this problem and could solve this problem with us. So one thing would be to do these roundtables, but also we are working, on a number of other initiatives. For example, something that we could do to unify tickers. So you know, like the famous example that everyone cites is there are three or four different projects, groups of assets that actually have the same ticker, HOT. So with that in mind,

we're trying to see whether there's a way for us to unify things like that so that people cannot take advantage of the fact that some assets have the same tickers and try to pass them off as something else, for example. So that's another transparency issue that we've noticed. So in the future, we're also looking at whether the alliance can do things like fund projects that are focused on transparency or fund other initiatives that align with our philosophy around transparency and accountability and data. Well, I couldn't help but notice that some of the exchanges who partnered with you on this data alliance are some of the same exchanges that the Bitwise report showed were some of the most egregious when it came to fake volumes.

And then on the other hand, some of the exchanges that they cited as having real volume, such as Coinbase or Cracken, which I should disclose as a sponsor of this show, and BitStamp are actually not a part of the Data Alliance. So how did you go about choosing those members? Yeah. So I think for us, when we wanted to start with the Data Alliance, The idea was to work with any exchange that really has shown us that they want to fix this problem. So part of it was you have to work with people who might be accused or are doing it

because you kind of want to know what they're thinking and how that affects them. So we actually took that into account that they submitted a very thoughtful response and they gave us several solutions for how they would actually change it up as part of the process of working together on the alliance. So we were not filtering out specifically for what they were doing, but rather the intent behind it. And I think it has worked out because we see some of the exchanges on there have provided really good feedback to us and that has affected into the way that we were thinking about the way that we thought about the volume problem at that point in time. Yeah, and I'll just name some of the ones that, you know, the Bitwise report named as being the most egregious, which were HitBTC, OK, X, and Whobe, and, you know, those are the ones that are part of your alliance. But one thing that then I noticed was for your new liquidity metric, you know, I guess you're rolling it out in phases, but at least you can see it now for exchanges. And Hit BTC is ranked first in liquidity, which, like I said, just a few months ago, it apparently had some of the highest. fake volumes. Hobe was third and OKX was fourth. So then this made me question, you know,

are they gaming the new liquidity metric? Like, do you think they actually have that much liquidity and somehow bitwise was wrong? Or is it, I mean, it could be that, you know, since the report came out, they've now significantly cleaned up the trading and, and also attracted real volume. But, you know, I just have to admit, like, given the backstory, it looked suspicious, especially since hit BTC, at least at this moment, is number one, but with like just a bit more liquidity than Binance. Like, I don't know, it just looks very like, oh, like how convenient. We're ahead of finance, which people should know, you know,

is one of the ones with real volume that was said had real volume. So anyway. Yeah, I think a few points to the question. I think the first point is Hit BC, why is HeBTC number one? I did look at their other books. And for the most part, they did have legitimate. liquidity. However, I can't say the same for volumes because that is always the question on everyone's minds. So in launching this whole liquidity matrix, we wanted to shift the focus on the minds of

traders and people in the space to kind of really distill what really matters and that's what we believe is liquidity. So the reason why they are above Binance is mainly because they have a lot more market pairs. I think if you see on our site, they're listing 840 different market pairs, whereas Binance only has about 400,500 different market pairs. So the more market pairs you have, the more liquidity you're providing to the space, the higher you would be ranked on that simple metric. So that's something that hopefully, yeah, it's, for what it's worth, they do provide liquidity to the space. Do they wash trade? I'm not too sure.

I need a different set on metric altogether. But, I mean, we could take Bitwise's word for that and say, hey, they do wash trade. But the flip side is, is wash trading really that important or is liquidity for the space more important? And I would argue the latter, not the former. All right. Yeah, I also want to talk about one other way in which another data provider has tried to respond to this issue. Crypto Compare took a pretty different tack from coin market cap. And granted, I mean, the sites, you know, have been different for quite a while.

But this summer, they began releasing this exchange benchmark report where they not only place less emphasis on volume, but they actually see. that they don't even directly include it when they do the ranking. And they focus primarily on legal slash regulatory security and data provision. And that means they include factors like insurance, the experience of the team, geography. And by geography, they mean like where the exchange is domiciled to take into account kind of like whether or not it's in a jurisdiction with lower regulatory standards. So has coin market cap ever considered, including those, kinds of factors when it ranks exchanges? Yeah. So when we thought about a metric that makes sense for us, I think what we were trying to optimize for was to make sure that we can first

address the problem head on at the root. And I think many of the other solutions or ideas that came out as a result of the volume inflation tried to skirt around the problem by either focusing on a specific set of exchanges or some attribute that they deem more important, like regulation or and so forth. So I don't think we are ruling out that. I think it depends on who the market is targeted at because, for example, for crypto compare, like they might be using these benchmarks more because they're pursuing the institutional market where, you know, historically institutional markets will look for things like specific venues that you could trade at, like NASDA, or whatever. So those specific ones, you would try to get a sense of. Whereas I think for us,

we are trying to go for the global retail audience. And so they need to know specifically if I'm trying to trade an asset, where can I trade it for the best price with the least slippage? And that would help them to determine where they would get the best outcome. Whereas, you know, if we include other factors that were less data-driven based on every single, like the tens of thousands of market pairs that we have, then that would probably be a separate product or a packaging of a different product that we would target differently than the current audience that we have on the site. All right. So I actually want to also circle back to something that we touched upon briefly more toward the beginning when Gerald talked about how he came to work at coin market cap.

obviously that was through the acquisition that you mentioned of your company hashtag capital. And you talked about how you were focused on trying to offer a true price. So I just wondered, like, can you describe, you know, what are the problems that come up when you try to create a true price? I mean, we talked about this a little bit when we talked about the kimchi premium, but I didn't know if there were other issues. But I also was curious to know, like, how you even define true price. Sure. I think that's a very interesting question, right? So for the most part, in terms of how pricing works in crypto in the space, it's very unique because this is the very first time we have an asset class that is truly decentralized in terms of its trading venues.

For most equities in the U.S., it's located in the New York Stock Exchange and the futures is on CME, you have very centralized exchanges that kind of encapsulate all the liquidity of that asset class on that exchange. So for the very first time, we have multiple venues, hundreds of venues for Bitcoin for the matter, and how do you then discern the true price of Bitcoin vis-a-vis all these different exchanges? So in terms of how people have done it, so let me give you a few examples of how people have done it. The derivatives exchanges, for example, need a very robust price index because the perpetual swaths, for example, will be priced using the few exchanges that they select. So for the most part, most people select the U.S. of specs such as Bitcoin,

Kraken, Gemini, BitStam, right? Because these exchanges are the most regulated ones, and they could kind of say, like, hey, these are the most regulated ones. We trust the trades that are on there. Let us use these prices as the baseline for index. The problem is you kind of forget the entire universe of crypto currency exchanges, the binances, the whoopies, the OK-Xs,

well, they may, like you rightly pointed out, they may have questionable volumes, but the truth of the matter is they have very legitimate liquidity, very large pools of liquidity that we need to take into account in terms of getting the true price of volume. So one problem in this whole equation is the exchanges in the US price their Bitcoin in USD terms, and that's USD that you can transact from bank to bank, right, because it's the same ecosystem. However, most of the unregulated run unregulated exchanges, they price their Bitcoin in USDT,

And that's a problem because USDT does not equate most for the most part to USD. But the point is, Bitcoin USDT pairs should also matter because they are one of the most liquid pairs. Finance, for example, Hwopi, for example, they all have very liquid market pairs in terms of Bitcoin USDT. So the real question is, how do you then factor that part in terms of how Bitcoin is price vis-a-vis this entire ecosystem? And that's what we're trying to solve because we believe that only if you include all these different exchanges and different market pairs for Bitcoin, can you truly discern the true value of Bitcoin? And that's what we're trying to work towards. Wow. Wow. That sounds super fascinating. Super, super interesting. And so, like, what does your technology do to get that truer price? Sure. So in terms of how we kind of use it, how we use our true price algorithm, imagine every single, every single market pair as a, you know, equation. So, for example, you have Bitcoin USD on Coinbase as one equation, Bitcoin

USD on Cracken as an R equation, Bitcoin USDT on Binance as an R equation. So you have essentially A over B, A over B, B, B over C. And all these equations have an answer. And that is the last done price of the market. So with all the different market pairs in the space, you have many, many equations, multiple, multiple equations. And the true matter is there is a mathematical formula to solve the, to use the solutions to all these equations to arrive at the answer that best fits the all the different assets that comprise the unknowns. So that is what we're, it's, it may seem complicated, but it's matter of solving many multiple simultaneous equations to arrive at the best fit answer for all these different assets. And we believe that's the best way

to find the true value of Bitcoin vis-a-vis any other asset that you want to price it with. All right. So before, um, We end here. I actually wanted to circle back to the circulating supply issue because I did refer to this controversy or I hinted at it in the beginning. But Carolyn, you wrote a little history of coin market cap and you talked about how even from the beginning when ripple was added, it started a controversy right away. And for a while to satisfy the different groups who were protesting, you guys even had two versions of the site. So what was that controversy about? I think at that point in time, people wanted to look at the different cryptos. And XRP at that point, there were some contests over total supply, circulating supply, and things like that. So I think that battle still continues today. But for the most part, if you look at XRP on the site, they have what is currently in the hands of people and what is not.

and we actually take that number instead of the total supply. So at that point, because there was so much contesting over like, is XRP really a crypto, like what is XRP's true supply? Brandon made a decision to actually spin out of a different site. But later on, he realized that obviously it was unsustainable to keep two versions of the same site, just because of one asset. So he put XRP back on her main site, and it has continued. the way to end is today.

Yeah, so let's dive into the issues there because so earlier this year, Ryan Selkis of Masari did a report on Ripple where he stated that due to the lockups and other selling restrictions, Ripple circulating supply was quite a bit lower than what was shown on coin market cap. And later Ripple did state that his report was based on an incorrect calculation of market cap, but also said that even some of the assumptions. he made around lockups were inaccurate, although I will say that I know through my own reporting that at least one of them was completely accurate. So, you know, I'm not sure which one of the points

Ripple was, you know, contesting. But anyway, you know, at this point in time, does coin market cab, for instance, let's just start with the first point that Ryan made, which was about Jed McCaleb's allotment of XRP, which he is so restricted from selling that it's basically kind of like totally locked up. So does coin market cap include the amount that Jed has in the circulating supply or or not? Like like what do you do with these kind of irregular type of situations? So I think we had something similar where people ask do Satoshi's wallets count in the circulating supply of Bitcoin. So I think the team does deal with situations like that for the most part. And

But do you know how they've decided it? Yeah. So I think as long as it is possible to sell it, they would include it. So that was the decision that was made. So back to the main. But in the case of Jed where like legally he's he's restricted, then would those be counted or not? So as they as they unlock or as he is able to sell them, they would become circulating. And they would be part of the numbers that they could.

the team can verify on the Explorer, in which case they would be counted in circulating. Oh, okay. So essentially, coin market cap excludes them at the moment. Because the amount that he can sell is like, it's just, it's like, you know, zero point whatever. Or point zero point zero, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. And I think, in fact, when we talk about the origin, like the origin story of XRP on CMC, it was less about supply and it was more about a concentration of power rather like centralization. So people were protesting SRP because they said it was centralized as opposed to the fact that the supply numbers were not as expected. I think that was something that actually took some time

to develop as a story. Oh, oh, I see. Okay. So they weren't they actually weren't taking issue with the So that was more like a thing Ryan did. Okay, I see. Well, all right. So, you know, we talked a little bit about the kind of traffic you see on your site based on the trends you're seeing in the site traffic or the way the activity is changing in the site. Where do you think the space is headed in the near term? Yeah, I think we have some theories there about what would happen. And obviously, none of them we can verify at this moment. But for example, we do see, over time, it's possible that there will be more concentration of assets. So maybe we would concentrate to the top few hundred and the top few thousands is possible. So I think that that's just part of the natural evolution of space. That's something that we notice. I think the second is people are interested also in crypto or even slightly non-crypto things like Libra.

So like the moment that we put labor app on the site, we got lots of hits. It was like the top crypto that was, top asset that was researched on that day. So I think as more and more of these types of assets come on the site, we do see more mainstream interest in them beyond just the more kind of traditionally crypto asset structures that we are used to. And the third would be around institutional and also pricing. So we talked a lot about liquidity. We talked a lot about how to price different assets. And I think that because of the fact it's so critical for someone to be able to provide that kind of accurate pricing, algorithm, and things like that to the institutional space, we do see people coming to us and actually asking us how we might be able to help with some of these solutions. And so kind of in totality, we see a greater maturing of the space as compared to even just two years ago, where it was more of a craze.

And now people are actually really looking at directives, really looking at yields, really looking at ways that they can price markets better, looking for more professional ways, basically, of charting and also interacting and buying and selling crypto. All right. Well, we will see whether your predictions play out. Thank you both so much for coming on Unchained. Where can people learn more about you and Coin Market Cap? So go to Coin MarketCap.com. We have a ton of stuff in the navigation bar. If you've never clicked on that bar before, it has a ton of resources in there that would be really helpful. So check out lots of our new products there. And you can also find us on social with the handle at Quarkey. record cap across all socials. Great. All right. Well, thank you both so much for coming on Unchained. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Laura. Thanks so much for joining us today.

To learn more about Carolyn, Gerald, and Coin Market Cap, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you're not yet subscribed to my other podcast Unconfirmed, which is shorter, a bit newsier, and now features a short news recap. Be sure to check that out. Also, find out what I think are the top crypto stories each week by signing up for my email newsletter at Unchained Podcast.com. Unchain is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from faster recording, Anthony Yoon, Daniel Nuss, and Josh Durham. Thanks for listening.