CoinGecko & CoinMarketCap Fast Track Listings on CMC in 24H

The world of cryptocurrencies is awash with projects; some new and others which have been around for decades; some with a few users while others move billions in trading volume daily; some targeting specific use cases while others offer a general-purpose platform to build all manner of applications; some trading for a few cents while others soar to tens of thousands of dollars; some with superstar founders like Vitalik Buterin while others were launched by anonymous teams.

But for all their differences, crypto projects have one thing in common – they all rely on price-tracking websites for discoverability, and the two most popular ones are CoinMarketCap (CMC) and CoinGecko (CG).

Price-tracking websites allow users to hop on, check out which way the market is swaying, see which cryptos are making the biggest moves, analyze the markets and so much more. 

They can be the difference between one crypto getting millions of new users and trading billions of dollars on exchanges as another languishes in obscurity and ends up with negligible trading volume. 

They can give any crypto project the credibility it needs to appeal to investors, especially those that aren’t as experienced and are wary of putting their money in scams. A project that’s not on these price-tracking websites is viewed both as too new and risky to bet on or as an outright scheme that’s waiting to sink with investor money, making them some sort of crypto king makers.

The numbers speak for themselves. According to Similarweb, a web traffic analysis platform, CMC ranks as the 281st most popular website in the world in the past month. In that time, it saw 194 million visits from crypto investors seeking to find out how their favorite crypto is trading. And despite the market downturn in 2022, CMC has managed to stay in the top 500 websites globally, attracting more than 530 million views in the past three months alone.

CMC is such a powerful platform in crypto that in 2020, the world’s largest exchange Binance forked out $400 million to acquire it. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao best summed up the significance of the platform, telling one outlet, “CoinMarketCap has more users than any other product in the crypto space…it has the users, it’s a very valuable platform.”

CoinGecko is the second-most popular price-tracking website in the world. According to Similarweb, the site ranks 844th in the world, seeing 74 million visits in the past month alone.

While they have their differences, the two platforms essentially offer the same things to their users. Some of the most important aspects that users take to these platforms to check out are:

• Price – this is the most obvious. CMC and CG aggregate the price of 10,000 and 13,000 cryptos respectively, pooling their data from most of the world’s popular exchanges. They also show how much a crypto has lost or gained over a set period of time as well as where it’s trading.
• Market Cap – this metric allows users to be aware of which coins are the biggest in the world, being a product of total coins in circulation and the price. Bitcoin remains the crypto with the biggest market cap, at one time hitting $1.26 trillion.
• Volume – this metric is very important to traders as it shows them which cryptos other traders are aping into. The volume metric can also help traders anticipate big price moves as it shows the level of activity in the market.
• Project breakdown – this is not a metric, but rather, it’s the simple and usually short explainer that these two sites offer regarding what a crypto project is, its founders, what it purports to solve, what makes it unique, its circulation, best wallets and more.

There are other metrics that CMC and CG help traders with, including the ranking of exchanges and NFTs, tracking their portfolios, simple explainers, news and more.

For CoinMarketCap, there are four tiers of listing. These are:

1. Unverified Listing – These are projects which have yet to be reviewed by the team at CMC, but whose data shows up through automated processes.
2. Inactive Listing – These are projects that the platform has labeled as inactive due to the absence of market data on at least one exchange or which have ceased operations, either permanently or temporarily. They can be relisted by CMC if they can prove that they have substantial trading volume on at least two exchanges supported by CMC.
3. Untracked Listing – This is for projects that don’t meet CMC’s requirements to track market data but exhibit strengths in its evaluation framework criteria.
4. Tracked Listing – This is for projects that have met the guidelines and fulfil the platform’s criteria.

COINMARKETCAP LISTING CRITERIA AND REQUIREMENTS

While the CMC team considers a whole raft of factors before listing a cryptocurrency, it adheres to three main guidelines in its evaluation:

• Credibility – The platform looks at whether a project can be able to back the claims it makes about its crypto and provide sufficient evidence to support them.
• Verifiability – Once a project provides the platform with information about its crypto, CMC must be able to verify it through credible sources.
• Methodology – CMC also considers whether the request to list a crypto adheres to its methodology before listing it.

If your project manages to meet these guidelines, the platform then gets into the nitty gritty of the project and looks at the following aspects:

1. It must have a functional website and a block explorer that tracks all the transactions. This is the first point of contact for a new user and are critical in giving them confidence in the project, with cryptos that have a clumsy website tending to scare off potential investors, even in the rare instances where they are legitimate.
2. Must trade publicly on at least one exchange that CMC recognizes, and with material volume. The platform supports hundreds of exchanges, catering even to projects that are niche-based or targeting specific regions.
3. It must be leveraging distributed ledgers, a consensus algorithm, cryptography or smart contracts, which is the most basic aspect of a cryptocurrency. CMC has a big team of experts who are experienced in such technology and no matter how the project is built, they can be able to comprehend.
4. Must provide at least one representative with whom CMC can be contacting if it needs to find anything out about the project. This ensures that the platform can easily ask for clarifications, additional documents, ask questions and more.

COINMARKETCAP’S EVALUATION FRAMEWORK

Beyond these guidelines, the platform conducts holistic evaluation and pays close attention to several factors, both qualitative and quantitative. This means that getting your project listed is not a simple matter of ticking off a checklist or doing just enough to meet the minimum thresholds since this would open up the platform to abuse and manipulation by unscrupulous actors.

There are several projects that have met many of the listing criteria and still failed to score a CMC listing. This is usually done to protect investors as getting listed on the platform usually gives them the idea that the project is legitimate and is worth investing in. If CMC was to accept every project that meets the minimum criteria, it would end up listing thousands of projects that have no intention to fulfil the promises they make on their whitepapers.

1. Trading Volume & Market Pairs

This is a critical metric for CMC, with the trading volume and liquidity enabling the platform to establish a market price for users to buy and sell the crypto. The market pairs on the supported exchanges are just as important to the platform, as well as the source of the volumes. This metric is adhered to even once a project has been listed on CMC. CoinMarketCap can delist a project whose trading volume is too little to count.

2. Traction and Progress

CMC monitors a project and evaluates whether it has been making progress over its lifespan. This includes the growth in its user base, whether it has recorded significant partnerships in that time, its adoption by institutional as well as retail users and how much progress it has made towards its roadmap. 

3. Community Interest & Engagement

A project is only as good as its community, and CMC understands this well. Community interest in a project, and how well it engages with this community, is one of the frameworks that the platform uses to evaluate any project. There are projects that have tens of millions of users, but even those that have just a few thousand are just as viable, given that this community is active and the engagement is high. 

4. Practicality & Impact

Is your project practical? This is yet another aspect that CMC considers when evaluating a project. While many of the other frameworks are obvious, practicality is more nuanced. Your plans can have grand plans and be futuristic, but are those practical in today’s market? Is your project solving an actual problem that exists today or are you promising something that the market doesn’t even need today?

CMC requires that a project have impact on the market today, referencing livestreaming and e-commerce in the ‘90s which failed to take off despite having great ideas that have become worth billions today. The platform believes that “it is critical that a project be easy to implement and use for a sizeable addressable market.”

5. Team Members

It’s entirely possible for a newbie or rookie to make a groundbreaking project that changes the crypto landscape. After all, Vitalik Buterin didn’t have much experience in the crypto industry when he invented Ethereum. However, even he had the assistance of highly experienced and knowledgeable people in his team, including Dr. Gavin Wood (who went on to launch Polkadot), Charles Hoskinson (who went onto launch Cardano) and Joseph Lubin (who now heads ConsenSys).

CMC considers the team behind a project in its evaluation. This includes the actual team members, investors, advisors and others whose contribution is critical to the success of the project. And it’s not just about the people – CMC also looks at their conduct, including their professionalism and transparency as it assesses a listing.

6. Uniqueness

Today, there are tens of thousands of projects, all vying for the attention of investors. Many solve, or at least claim to solve very similar problems, with some almost looking like copycats of each other. Some have even gone as far as having whitepapers that look almost identical.

CMC expects any project that is vying for listing to prove its uniqueness. This can be in its native technology, applications or even the problems that it looks to solve. The platform believes that while this gives investors a new perspective, it also contributes to the overall growth of the entire industry.

7. Project Longevity

The crypto industry has been around for just a decade. Even some of the biggest projects, including Ethereum, have been around for less than 10 years. In that time, we have seen many projects come and go. Some have even shot up to become worth billions of dollars before collapsing spectacularly, sometimes with millions of investors (remember OneCoin or Bitconnect).

CMC prefers to list projects that have stood the test of time and have proven their value proposition through the bull and bear markets. However, the platform isn’t against listing new projects which meet the other criteria.

COINBOOSTS COINMARKETCAP LISTING SERVICE

With all these requirements, criteria to meet, evaluation frameworks to satisfy and more, getting your project on CoinMarketCap can seem like a daunting task (and honestly, it can be). 

This is where Coinboosts comes in. We take over the burden of preparing all the documentation required to list on CMC and ensure that your project meets the evaluation demands. All it takes is for you to contact us on Telegram @coinboostr and we will take care of the rest. No other company out there will get you a faster listing on CMC. 

Contact us today and let us help get your project to millions of potential investors.