Is This a BULL RUN? Interview with CoinGecko COO Bobby Ong

Hey guys and welcome back to the Box Money channel. Today we have a very exciting interview with the COO of CoinGecko. If you guys haven't been using CoinGecko, I don't know where you have been because it's one of the biggest aggregators of information about different cryptocurrency prices and where they're going and a lot of social media information. So today we have a very insightful interview with him about what's going on not just with CoinGecko but also with the whole crypto trend as well. So Bobby, thank you so much for coming on board. How have things been going? I think things are great over here. I think market's picking up finally after the close to two years bear cycle. I think DeFi is the trend now. Everything's moving up. I think Q2 was exceptionally great for all DeFi tokens and I think things have definitely exploded with Wi-Fi and now it's everyone's favorite coin. Yeah all of a sudden and I think that's been popping up. So I've still noticed that as well for CoinGecko you guys have been adding lists very very quickly. So like almost like every day when a new coin's been announced you guys added. Is there a criteria for adding new coins to the list? Are you guys just going all in? Yeah so before this we've got a relatively lenient listing policy. Any coin that is traded on any exchange we sort of list them and this includes being traded on a decentralized exchange as well. So any coin that was on Uniswap it gets added. But lately we started noticing that a lot of people are pulling off scams on Uniswap. So they create a new token, put it on Uniswap and then provide some liquidity and after a while they pull off liquidity leaving people in bags of tokens that can't be sold. We started to tighten the policy a little bit and only list coins that are more legit I suppose. I think this was, I mean this has been a relatively recent phenomenon because previously it was all centralized exchanges. There was no decentralized exchanges. Also we sort of relying on centralized exchanges to make the wetting or the screening process for coins and most of the time a centralized team will only list legit coins or scams. But when it comes to DEX, decentralized exchanges, the rules sort of change in the sense that anybody can list coins for listings. So yeah, definitely we are tightening up our listing policy here to make sure that there's less cases of scams being listed on CoinGecko. Got it, got it. So right now you can view a lot of different cryptocurrencies on CoinGecko. You guys also have widgets, you guys have been including exchange data as well. So one thing that you mentioned just now about the decentralized exchanges is that they're suddenly rising in popularity. Obviously Uniswap, Balancer, they both have huge amounts of trade volume on a daily basis. And on top of that they have liquidity pools as well. So do you see this as a challenge? Do you see this as an overall trend that decentralized finance tools are already challenging centralized finance? And do you think that we're kind of moving in a sustainable fashion as well? Yeah, so I guess there's two questions there, right? One is, will decentralized exchanges and decentralized finance thing kind of move forward, take it and then really be sustainable as well. So I'll talk about a trend first, right? So I think in terms of trend, yes, Q2, Q3 definitely is all about decentralized finance, decentralized exchanges. Let me share some interesting insights. So we started tracking internally, which are the most popular exchanges on CoinGecko. And one of surprising facts that we found was that Uniswap was the most popular exchange in Q3. So, so like so far in July, like everyone's just like searching on Uniswap. So it's like, hmm, I guess this is a trend right now. So more popular than any other centralized exchanges. So in terms of adding all these different DEXs, yes, it's definitely a big challenge for us. A lot of these DEXs, they don't really have a REST API, we don't really can't just integrate them like just like how we used to do centralized exchanges. So I think this is an interesting thing. Like we use the graph before we can even do any of these things. We have to even understand how we can get this data on CoinGecko. And thankfully, we found a solution on how we can get the on-chain data and integrate them onto CoinGecko. So that's how we have Uniswap. We have Balancel. We have Gnosis Protocol and many other DEXs. I think this is an interesting thing. Like we use the graph before we can even do any of these things. We have to even understand what these DeFi devs do. Like how do they operate? That is true. That is true. So did you personally deep dive into this, into all this DeFi stuff that's going on? Yeah, you have no choice. Like, I mean, if you want to write a wrapper or integrate to integrate Uniswap onto CoinGecko, first step is to understand how to use Uniswap. Yes. And like for most people going onto Uniswap, like, well, you know, it seems easy swapping, but like there is a lot of things that goes behind it. How does, how the liquidity pool works and all that. Yeah. So first step, take a look at the site, understand how it works and then like, then try to find a way to integrate the CoinGecko. So that's, so that's, that's kind of the thing. I think you guys are one of the only ones providing good data for a lot of coins as well. I think like in terms of all the other aggregators, they don't provide as recent relevant information, even with, even with the other Uniswap itself. I don't think their price information and graphing tools are there yet. And yet CoinGecko, I think you guys got it. So I think, I think I've been using guys prolifically for a while, but I think the second question, the second part of the question of obviously is what sustainability, because the biggest problem right now is obviously because Uniswap is becoming one of the most popular exchanges and any coin can list on there. Now, a lot of projects are just like listing and pulling a few scams. So did you notice that happening? Were there coins that you took down because they were like scams or whatnot? Yeah, definitely something that we saw recently because it's such an open platform, it's an open protocol. Anyone can, can list them. So at least tokens there, we started noticing some scams, some got added. So we kind of have a blanket policy to not list coins that are only traded on Uniswap these days, unless we have wetted through them. Unless we have wetted through them and verified that this is not a scam, then we add them. So these days, if the coin is only traded on Uniswap, like nah, we're not going to list them unless we definitely verify them first. Got it. How big is your verification team right now? Do you like, how many people do you have to verify this? Because I mean, how do you verify thousands of projects? I mean, that's the hard part. It's hard. It's hard. I mean, you've got a couple of guys like just checking things and all, but it's a tough problem, I would say. Yeah. I mean, we definitely want a leading aggregators out there because as I say, like integrating this data is not simple, not an easy way, not like any other centralized changes. So not many people have figured out a way how to do that yet. So we sort of managed to figure out. Nice. The next question I think is very interesting because you also list the plus 2% and minus 2% death there. Do you think this kind of exposed a lot of fake trading volume on different exchanges? Because sometimes you see a million trade volume, but the 2 plus more minus 2% death is like $10, right? Yeah, I think this was a problem for many of the centralized exchanges. They were reporting like insane amount of volume, like 100 million, 200 million volume. When we first started work on this order book death one year ago, we saw exchanges that report like over $100 million in daily trading volume for a particular pair, for example, LTC, BTC. And when we saw the bid-up spread, it was like 80%. That's insane. Obviously. It's obviously fake, right? Yeah, obviously fake. And all the trades that happened, like happened between the bid and us and like they report 100 million, but the bid and us was huge. And then like, obviously at 2% death, it's the zero, right? Or like some of them, like you said, like $10 of... So it's all this fake volume. They're just like telling you guys, telling exchange aggregators, oh, these trades are happening, but they're not real. They're made by bots. And if you actually try to target, and I think this is one of the issues, right? If you try to actually sell at the prices that you see the trading at, the orders would just automatically magically stop. Like all of a sudden, no one would do anything anymore because now I think you triggered something on the bots and the bots don't want to play anymore. So they just kind of take a break until you take your orders down. So even if they're reporting 100 or $200 million of volume, I don't think you can even sell $10 worth of a coin. So that was the situation in 2019. But I guess right now with Uniswap, you do actually have real debt because if liquidity pool is full, so long as it's not a pump and dump and people remove that liquidity instantly, so long as the liquidity is inside the pool, you do have that debt, right? So I think all of a sudden that's why people are starting to like Uniswap and Balancer and these automated market-made exchanges more. Yeah, yeah, definitely agree with you. I think this automated market maker thing is definitely a game changer because with that, you can sort of get some sort of liquidity. But I mean, the price may not be favorable if you try to sell a large amount, but like there is some liquidity. I mean, there's definitely a big win compared to like 90% of the other centralized fake volume trading exchanges. So Uniswap beats any of them hands down. Oh yeah, there's another point which I wanted to say just now, but I forgot talking about the fake coins on Uniswap, right? So I've given talks in Uniswap and they are working on some sort of a list to sort of see where to create the list and not just the list maintained by Uniswap. So that this is sort of kind of like prevent some sort of this fake coins being listed on Uniswap. I mean, you still be on Uniswap, but like if it's not on CoinGecko, for example, we may maintain the list and then someone else will maintain the list. Then we sort of know like which sort of coins will be more legit if it's on CoinGecko or some other places. Got it. So it's like a decentralized list, like multiple places will have their own list and kind of like the creation process done and sourced by multiple different people to kind of clean up the space. Interesting. Yeah. Nice, nice, nice. So, okay. So now we talked about this listing process. Now let's talk about decentralized finance. Obviously it's been picking up a lot recently. A lot more projects are coming in. So are you guys, what's your outlook on this? Do you think it's too fast, too furious that all of a sudden we kind of reentering that 2017 mentality? Or do you think this is what we should be doing anyways? Yeah. So I think everyone in the crypto space want to enter 2017, 2018 again. We all want to have the bull run. We all thought that will come by last. It didn't happen. Everyone thought like some people were saying STO will be the one that will bring us to the bull run. Some people say IEO will be the one that didn't happen. So maybe DeFi is the one. I think if anything, like it's quite hard to say, like the next six months will probably be crucial in determining whether we are going to enter the bull run or not. I think we are still at the early innings, like maybe the first base of an actual bull run. Do you have any interesting data you can share with us? Because obviously as a website, do you see in traffic going up? Do you see new people browsing? Do you keep anything you can share about that from that angle of where you're coming from? Yeah, definitely. So I think for the past year or so, right? Like, I mean, our traffic's been hovering around like 15 million monthly paid views or so. Like it's been pretty stagnant, like during the past year, you know, and then like the past one, two months, like traffic has definitely increased significantly for us. So the market hype is real. Right. Is it like one or two X or is it like 10, 20, 100 X sort of increase? More like 2X, 1.5, 2X. So we haven't really got that 10X. So that's why I say that I think market's picking up, but we are not seeing like a massive bull run yet. And what I feel is that a lot of these is like, it's internal, it's just existing crypto folks looking into DeFi. And we haven't really reached a stage where like the outsiders are coming in again. So if you remember 2017, 2018, like all your friends that haven't talked to you in years, like started calling you, hey, is this a good time to buy Bitcoin? Like, yeah, that's when you know, like, like market hype's there. So yeah, that's when your taxi driver, your whoever, like the person selling you in your newspaper, they're talking about crypto. And I think, I definitely think that's so as well. I mean, I recently I've been in a lot of chat groups. I've seen a lot of old faces come back and become active again, all of a sudden searching this, but it's definitely not the 2017 levels where you just see, I still remember going to New York at that time and just a banker in suits. I have no idea what crypto is, but they're like, this is the hottest thing in town. So I got to get in. You know, that was the, that was kind of the difference. And I don't see that yet, but hopefully we'll see how it goes in a few months. In that case, we have some community based questions as well. That's asked from a community. So set that. So guys, thank you guys so much for asking questions as well. It's all on box mining.com, but I'm going to pick a few out that are quite interesting. So first of all, this is about NFTs. This is asked by Zachariah drew. So it seems like you're the inspiration for BC hero cards and coin gecko. Do you have knowledge of this NFT asset? Are you making collaboration? And I've also seen, I guess I'll broaden this up to other NFT assets as well. I've seen you guys have the gecko cards. So are you guys big on NFTs and do you know about this card as well? Yeah. So I spoke to Joel from Joel Kong from Big Bad Podcast and he wanted, he's launching a project, blockchain heroes. And he asked if coin gecko is cool to collaborate to get asset. Yeah. It sounds like a fun game. We love NFT. And he made an NFT out of a picture of me, which I thought was pretty, pretty cool. So yeah, I have an NFT, my face floating around on the WEX blockchain. It's turned into a telegram sticker as well. So I thought me in a gecko suit. So I thought that was pretty fun. Pretty cool. Nice. I think, I think in terms of NFT, like I think it's very interesting. If you ask me what's next after DeFi, like, yeah, it's probably NFT. Probably NFT, yeah. Like how? Not so sure how, yeah. I mean, at one point we were, we were all into crypto kitties, right? Back in 2017. We were paying stupid guest fees for, to buy cats and all. But maybe, maybe it'll come back and maybe game, I've been, I've been pretty big on gaming myself, but obviously I've spotted a few issues. I've talked a lot about this on my channel, a few issues where in terms of game design, it's very hard for the average person to come in. I mean, you just said one of the biggest problems, you're paying intense gas fees. I mean, these gas fees can add up to the entire game cost, right? Sometimes like we've been clicking $20 gas fees for a while now. So, you know, I think that's one of the potential problems. So we need some scaling solutions for that, but hopefully we'll see what, what, what can happen in NFTs. Are you looking into any other of the NFT assets like the tokenizing art or in various games as well? Yeah, I think, I think a lot of, there's a lot of NFT projects. I'm not so sure which will take off eventually, but I think, I think maybe something that takes off, we'll probably get some inspiration from DeFi. Like, I mean, at the end of the day, like if something makes people money, like people were speculating on cats, people were speculating on like crops on DeFi farming now. I think if something comes out that has some sort of a game element that is addictive and has a chance to make a lot of money really fast. And I think that, that, that, that's probably a trigger that to... Got it. D, so it's a, it's a farming game that gives you out NFTs that are worth real money. Done deal. Maybe. Okay. This is actually quite interesting. Okay. So this is question eight from Coin, a crypto maniac. So is CoinGecko researching the possibility to migrate site on decentralized hosting such as IPFS, BTFS, and will a fully decentralized fast dynamic site be possible within the next few years? I think to decentralized CoinGecko and to IPFS. Yeah. Decentralized CoinGecko. Yeah, I think, I think, I think he asked an interesting question of how, because I mean, CoinGecko is obviously a centralized service at this point in time. Everything centralized from the team to the website and everything. I think decentralization is a process and how fast we get there. I, something that we talk about internally, not very actively or seriously at this point in time, but it's something that we think, is there a way to decentralize CoinGecko at some point in the future? And if there is a way, how do we do it? Is the current infrastructure ready for us to decentralize? If you, even if you want to. So these are questions that we asked. And I think there is for us from a point of view, there is no real rush to decentralize at this point in time, but maybe in the future when the infrastructure is more ready, like maybe we can consider it further. I think there is some aim or some intention to do that because we are obviously at the end of the day, the decentralized space. But how or when we don't really have the answer right now. So it's something that we have to think and see how the space mature and find a way to do that. Got it. Thank you. We also have a question from Tommy. He asks, how do you verify the circulating and total supply of a token before adding it to your site? Yeah, so most of the time we, the total supply is pretty relatively simple in the sense that if it's an ERC20 token, like it's typically on etherscan and you can get the total supply. But for circulating supply, we have to verify it with the team. So I'm just going to talk about the ERC20 token. So what we do is we have a spreadsheet which we pass to the team and ask them to provide all the addresses that are held by the foundation, by the team, lock team tokens, lock investors token, any tokens that are locked, then they cannot be transferred and they submit it to us. And then we will take a look, we verify and we check if everything sort of check out, then we sort of add them onto CoinGecko. And then for coins that are proof of work, for example, Bitcoin, Litecoin and all, typically the block explorer will have an API endpoint that shows how many coins that have been mined. So we take those coins and I mean the API endpoint and then we add them onto CoinGecko to read this. Got it. And I think one of the biggest questions to do with lock tokens, right? Because sometimes teams can have some soft locks on there for the token. So do you have a verification process to check if they're really locked by a smart contract or if it's locked by, you know, maybe one or two signatures, you know, like, is there a separation or difference here? It's a tough, it's a tough thing. I mean, at this point in time, we rely quite a lot on the integrity of the team to provide us with legitimate information and not fraudulent information. I mean, if the team wants to lie, then at some point things will break apart and it's on the team. Obviously, if the team comes to us and say like, oh, hey, I've got a coin and no tokens, no addresses are locked. Everything's unlocked. And we have a market cap of like $10 billion. Like, obviously, I mean, it doesn't make any sense and we wouldn't, we wouldn't list them. Right. Right. Right. So it's a bit of a art if you want to put it that way as well to see. Yeah, that's true. There's no real science to it because every case is different. And I think the next leading question obviously has to do with unlocks. Do you, would you be interested in putting like potential unlock times on the website as well? Potentially, if you know, X amount of investor coins get unlocked, would you be like, you know, would you be interested in adding that as a feature to tell people, oh, some coins unlock tomorrow. Be careful or something like that. I actually, you brought up a very interesting suggestion. We didn't talk about that. I've never thought about doing that yet. But I mean, at this point in time, the way we count circulating supplies, we track by addresses. So you can go to our circulating supply on coin page, click on the question mark icon and it breaks down like all the addresses that are locked. And it tracks the either scan or Binance Explorer, whichever token, the chain that it's on. And I see the number of coins. But actually, you brought up a good point. We can actually ask the team and add the date like when this coin, this addresses will be unlocked. But I guess the hard part is, say you have a team token, right? Say you are the advisor to a particular project and then it unlocks linearly over the next 12 months. Like, how am I going to? That's true. It unlocks every month. Daily unlock or monthly unlock, then it's hard. But if there's a particular milestone, that's an interesting addition. That's awesome. Cool. I hope you guys can look into that. That's very interesting because it's like we've been talking about dumpamentals on this channel. You know, what leads to potential, you know, there's pumpamentals, there's dumpamentals. And, you know, if there's one coin, one cent coins being unlocked and flooded into the market when the coins are like $2, obviously that's strong dumpamentals there. So maybe that's an interesting addition. Cool. So also the next thing is about security, right? Because now with DeFi coming into the space, we have a lot more smart contracts and a lot more audits. I recently saw you are working with Hacken AI for verification. Do you plan to add more kind of statistics on whether a smart contract has been verified or whatever exchange has been verified at this current point? Yeah, so I think we work with Hacken mainly to check on centralized exchanges, like a lot of the centralized exchanges. I mean, they're obviously holding user funds. So it's paramount that they have strong security measures. What Hacken found was that some of the exchanges don't even have a bug bounty program. Some of them don't have penetrative tests. And these are obviously basic security measures which every exchange should have. So I think that's quite a big plus for us now that we have Hacken's cybersecurity score for exchanges. We're working closer to them and see what else can we add to add more information on cybersecurity for smart contract DEXs and so on. I mean, there's obviously a lot of things to be added. So a lot of metrics that we want to track, not just on cybersecurity, but for other things as well. Yeah, for sure. Because I was just thinking about that as well. Because I mean, last week we were talking about Wi-Fi, it exploded. But at the same time, in terms of audits, can we start posting audits up whether it's by Hacken or by OpenSea? We have integrated with DeFi score. So there's some sort of security score there as well. Okay. So yeah, that's something. But more is needed. And definitely there's a lot more metrics as well, not just security. I think one of the things that we did when we saw all this coming out is a lot of people were asking about fully diluted valuation. So it's basically a max supply multiplied by the price and get fully diluted. And then we added it on CoinGecko for some of the coins. Obviously, there's a lot of coins on CoinGecko. So it takes a while to add all of them. But we're getting there. We're going to add. This is a new metric and something that a lot of people are looking into it, fully diluted valuation. Absolutely. Because obviously, if the circulating supply is only like 5%, then you're in trouble when the 95% unlocks. And oops, that's a big problem, right? It's quite funny how the trend has changed. I mean, if you look into the crypto space several years ago, everybody wants to launch a coin that has a large market cap, right? Because that's like big is strong and mighty, right? But these days, everybody wants to launch a coin with like the smallest market cap and like the smallest fully diluted valuation because then people are interested and say, okay, this coin has a strong chance of going big, big, big. Yeah. All of a sudden, like they're looking at moonshots. I mean, I think this trend started like two or three weeks ago, right? Because compound came in. It was too big. People were like, oh, maybe it's too big. It got attention. But like everyone's like, oh, we want everything, something under a million dollar cap. Now we want these micro caps. We want to go early. It's insane. And that's one trend. But who knows if it's going to stay long? Because obviously you're going into a lot of danger zone if you're looking at these micro caps. Who knows if they have any value there? So that's interesting. So interesting to add that fully diluted cap. I think that's very important. That's like absolutely vital. We have a yield farmer here. Meredith Rowe says, have you considered presenting your users with information available on something like yieldfarming.info? Yeah. So the team is actively discussing how to get all these APY and all. Not exactly an easier task. Like, well, obviously you have to understand all these different platforms, play on them, farm on them. And so, yeah, the team is working on them. I've heard discussion. I've seen some prototypes. Hopefully we'll be able to launch something soon. Awesome. Awesome. Hopefully. I'm pretty excited. You guys are moving at a really rapid pace. And I think that's going to be amazing to see what it's like in two or three months' time to get the information we need. Okay. So I guess we should kind of slowly wrap up all this whole discussion here. I definitely want to thank everyone. Big thank you to everyone who asked questions. It's been amazing. And you guys have a chance to win $50. I guess I'll get Bobby to choose what questions are the most interesting. So that's the most one. I'll just send you a list afterwards and I'll announce the winners later. Now, concluding up. So now let's just give some overall thoughts about this. So now we're entering a time. You said roughly there's about 1.5x more views coming in. You have more activity. How do you foresee it? Do you think that we are really entering a bull market? Or do you think we're kind of in a fake-out zone? You know, potentially going back down again a little bit like some of the hypes that happened last year? Oh, it's a tough question to answer that. I don't know how to answer. I mean, I've always got a conservative side to myself. So I'm like, when everyone's really bullish on it, I was like, okay, guys, be careful, guys, because this can always go back down. But the part of me feels that I think we are almost there for the next bull run. I mean, if you look at the previous cycle, typically the bull, the bear market typically lasts between three to four years. So I think we are somewhere around there, 2018, 2019, 2020. And a friend like did an analysis before at the start of this year. He did look at Bitcoin's weekly chart, weekly candles. And he said like, it won't be a breakout year this year. It will be a breakout year next year. So I think that sort of makes sense. If you look at not daily, not hourly, this is the week. So there wasn't that many points. But so I think, I think what I think it's sort of true. I think we'll be seeing some sort of, we are building this, the ground, the business scene for 2021 bull market. So that's kind of my take on things. Awesome. I hope to catch you up soon. And thank you so much for coming on to this video. I hope everything goes well, guys. Definitely check out CoinGecko. I think they have a lot of developments going on. That's very amazing. And I hope to see you very soon, Bobby. Yep. Same here. Same here. Thank you.