“With hundreds of cryptocurrencies already out in the market and dozens more created each month, we at CoinGecko feel that it is really difficult to decide which altcoin to hold and invest in.”
Indeed, it’s pretty hard to understand which digital currency to invest in or when it’s time to sell. Even if you are an experienced user of digital currency, keeping up with the vast number of cryptocurrencies launching every month is an onerous job.
CoinGecko is a new and fast growing service – the site was launched by Bobby CE Ong and TM Lee on April 8, 2014. CoinGecko Bobby CE Ong told Cointelegraph in an interview:
“TM Lee and I started CoinGecko because we both wanted a way to easily capture all the relevant data relating to cryptocurrencies in one page to help us compare coins. We are altcoin traders and are particularly interested to find coins that have a potential future by making all the information available in one page to help save us time.”
Here, users may find all the basic information on the most popular digital currencies, their description and price charts with historical 24 hours, 7 days, 14 days and 30 days pricing data.
The most interesting feature of this service is that it lists the world's top cryptocurrencies and ranks them based on key aspects such as developer activity, community, and liquidity. Bobby CE Ong explains:
“For example, if we want to compare the community strength of different coins, before CoinGecko, we had to head to the Reddit, Facebook and Twitter pages of the coins to get the Subscriber, Likes and Followers count. Then we have to make a rather subjective judgment call on how active these accounts are. With CoinGecko now, we get to see all these metrics for various coins in one page and even see how active the coin's subreddit by looking at the number of new posts and comments that made it to the front page each day.”
Developers of CoinGecko believe that digital currencies hold a lot of promise. Bobby CE Ong first found out about Bitcoin when it started becoming mainstream news during the Cyprus banking fiasco:
“I graduated in Economics from UCL in 2012 and I learnt in university that with federal deposit insurance scheme, depositors in banks should not be worried about bank runs anymore. I saw that this trust to the government can be breached and it set a precedent worldwide and saw some value in bitcoin where people would seek ways to protect their wealth.”
At the moment CoinGecko service covers 53 digital currencies and adds a few more each week to make the ranking more complete.
“We plan to increase the number of metrics that we have on CoinGecko to give cryptocurrency traders more data to help guide their decision making. We also plan to make our ranking and metrics more robust to prevent cases of people manipulating our metrics,” said Bobby. “Our near term plan is to grow our recently launched dashboard to give a daily overview of only the coins which traders are interested in.”
The CoinGecko has already done a big job and collected the most important information. The feedback from its users is really positive and site developers plan to improve the service to cover almost all the cryptocurrencies that exist today.