Quicknode

March 31, 2023 — 6 min read

CoinGecko is an industry-leading crypto data aggregator that tracks price, volume, exchange stats, NFTs, and much more.

For this Feature Friday, Co-founders of CoinGecko, TM Lee and Bobby Ong, join us to discuss their company's mission, growth, and upcoming plans. With a vision to empower the decentralized future, CoinGecko provides comprehensive market information on over 11,000 crypto assets from more than 700 exchanges worldwide. Their commitment to delivering unbiased, accurate, and reliable data has made them an essential resource for those looking to make informed decisions in the ever-evolving world of cryptocurrency.

As we delve into this insightful conversation, we explore how CoinGecko has grown and changed since its inception, along with its expansion into new products like GeckoTerminal, a real-time decentralized exchange (DEX) tracker. We'll also discuss prominent trends in the web3 space, their journey in founding CoinGecko, and their new Price Feed Data add-on in the QuickNode Marketplace.

Learn more about CoinGecko.

QuickNode 🤝 CoinGecko — available in the QuickNode Marketplace

Q&A With CoinGecko 👇

Could you introduce yourself and share your company's mission and what it offers to its customers?

TM: I’m TM Lee, co-founder and CEO of CoinGecko. We are the world’s largest independent cryptocurrency data aggregator, and our vision is to empower the decentralized future. We currently track 11,000+ crypto assets from over 700+ exchanges worldwide, and deliver comprehensive information from thousands of data points, to empower the crypto community with an in-depth, 360-degree view of the market.

Broadly, I oversee all the tech-related functions at CoinGecko, encompassing product, engineering, and UI/UX.

Bobby: I’m Bobby Ong, co-founder and COO of CoinGecko, and I oversee all the business functions. At CoinGecko, we believe that anything that can be tokenized, will be tokenized, and we foresee a future where there will be millions of tokens. CoinGecko was built to equip users with unbiased, accurate, and reliable data so that they can make better-informed decisions with regard to cryptocurrency research.

How has your company grown and changed since its inception, and what do you have planned for its future?

While CoinGecko has been specializing in tracking cryptocurrency price data since its inception, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have grown significantly in recent years. This has propelled us to launch our second product, GeckoTerminal, a real-time DEX tracker that makes on-chain token data more accessible for everyone.

As for CoinGecko, we’ll continue to iterate and improve our product to fulfill our users’ needs. In an ever-evolving industry, it’s important for us to ensure we value-add to our users, no matter which stage of their crypto journey they are in.

In the world of web3, what are some of the most prominent trends you are currently observing? Which ones do you believe will gain momentum in the coming years?

We’ve seen an increase in funding that went into the DeFi sector last year, as compared to 2021. In light of the recent bank collapses and FTX’s demise, DeFi may potentially gain momentum, and we expect to see an increase in on-chain participants and the industry to mature further.

Investments also went into GameFi in 2021, though existing game offerings are still fairly rudimentary. More needs to be done in order to compete with their Web2 or traditional gaming counterparts, in order to onboard the next million crypto users.

We are also excited to see more NFTs being incorporated in Web2 consumer businesses, not just as a collectible but NFTs providing real-world utility – Reddit, Starbucks, and Amazon, just to name a few. From this, we’ll likely see more gamified and tokenized experiences emerge as well.

What inspired you to develop CoinGecko, and how did you conceive of the idea?

We started CoinGecko in April 2014. Back then, we were doing some cryptocurrency trading and wanted a way to get additional data related to cryptocurrencies, such as community and developer stats, in order to compare cryptocurrencies. At the time, there was no such service or platform. Hence, we decided to build CoinGecko to solve our own needs.

The cryptocurrency market was really small up until early 2017. Crypto was only talked about by people deep in the computing industry, as not many people understood the potential of blockchain technology.

In such a tiny market, CoinGecko could only survive as a side hustle for both of us. The crypto boom of 2017 expanded the crypto market significantly and brought in a lot of new users. The expanded user base allowed both of us to leave our jobs to focus fully on CoinGecko and grow it to where we are now.

Can you provide insight into CoinGecko's progress by sharing any metrics or milestones indicating its traction?

CoinGecko currently tracks more than 11,000 crypto assets on over 700 exchanges worldwide, spanning eight years of historical crypto data. More than 10 billion API calls occur on our cryptocurrency data feeds each month. Our average monthly user base exceeds 10 million, and we have crossed 1 million in total mobile app downloads!

Can you provide insight into why the CoinGecko API was created and who the target market is?

Fundamentally, CoinGecko’s API was created in order to make crypto price data accessible to developers. Sourcing and aggregating prices across cryptocurrencies can be time-consuming and complex, and we wanted to offload that from developers, so that they can focus on building applications and innovating.

Our API user base has since grown to serve a host of different users and use-cases, beyond just developers. Researchers, institutions, enterprises, and various projects rely on our API to obtain price feeds, market data, metadata, and historical data of crypto assets, NFTs, exchanges, and more.

What excites you most about the partnership with QuickNode and being in the Marketplace?

We believe data should be accessible to all and are deeply committed to our vision, which is to empower the decentralized future. Our partnership with QuickNode aligns with this, and allows us to extend CoinGecko’s API to developers within the QuickNode ecosystem – so that they can easily and conveniently use our crypto data in an environment familiar to them.

We’re excited to be on the QuickNode marketplace, and ultimately support all kinds of innovation in the Web3 space!