We had the opportunity to interview the co-founder of CoinGecko, Bobby Ong, and hear about cryptocurrency data collection and analysis from different angles of the Crypto market. Bobby also shares the story of his Crypto journey that lead him to the foundation of CoinGecko. Please have look at his amazing story and views.
Bobby Ong(Co-Founder at CoinGecko)
Interview Date :25th February 2020
CoinGecko’s Co-founder
I am Bobby Ong, and I am the co-founder of CoinGecko. CoinGecko is a cryptocurrency data aggregator. We track over 6500 tokens from over 400 foreign exchanges. We are one of the largest leading crypto data aggregators in the world. Besides tracking prices, market cap, and trading volume, we also track the social media and development stats for all coins. We also track cryptocurrency derivatives in the crypto space. We have already 250 contracts tracked from 20 derivative exchanges.
Every quarter we publish a report, and we share insight into the crypto market. For the latest report, it’s around 70 ~ 80 pages. We also have a crypto API that we provide for free and which is used by top crypto companies like Metamask, Etherscan, Mycrypto, MyEtherWallet and many more. We also do try to get real volumes for crypto exchanges. We have a lot of exchanges that we look at various additional data points besides volume data such as order book data, Similarweb traffic estimates etc., and this is what we call the Trust Score.
So we have a research team and liaise. Due to our search about things in the crypto industry, so we collect that data, and create presentations based on what we have found about market consumption. Some of the data information that we are already tracking from various sources like price, market cap data, so it is getting data information and put them into charts and visualize it so that it is easier for people to understand them. For the last quarter report, we did a section in DeFi and crypto derivatives. We looked at some of the projects in space, to crypto derivatives, some of the project, we looked at, so it is a matter of what the team thinks will be relevant.
New Internet Money of 2013
I graduated with a degree in economics from University College London. In my final year of university, I was teaching myself how to code, so I was naturally spending a lot of time on programming websites. Soon after, I stumbled upon a group of people who were talking about crypto. They were calling it the “new Internet Money”. I got really curious because I had spent 3 years of my life in the UK learning about money from one of the best universities in the world, however my lecturers never mention Bitcoin at all. So this got me thinking “Why are these tech geeks talking about a new form of money but I did not learn about it in university?”
Bobby Ong
Either way, I started reading about Bitcoin, and the more I read about it, I realized that there is actually quite a lot of potential, and the logic sounds pretty sound. I decided to get my first Bitcoin back in 2013. I remember getting it from a peer to peer marketplace. When I saw the Bitcoin going out from the exchange wallet to a wallet that I could control myself, I really saw the potential of Bitcoin in a sense that, for the first time one can be your own bank, because you actually control your own keys, and no one can freeze or take money from you if you don’t allow them to. This to me was an advantage compared to the traditional financial system, and I also like the fact that there is a finite number of 21 million coins. These backdrop of quantitative easing, massive easing back in those days and those years, that to me does not sound sustainable, so the more I look and read about it, the more I was convinced that this has very strong potential for the future.
Market Corrections and Huge Drop in Price was expected
I don’t think Bitcoin is a good use for money laundering. If you look at the whole picture, I don’t think that there was a lot money laundering involved in 2017. If you want to do money laundering in crypto, there is a lot of on-chain analytics to that as well. The police are actually actively using it, so does the FBI, and they have caught a lot of people guilty of money laundering. However I wouldn’t want to link this to the huge drop in 2017. At that time, Bitcoin was trading at ~1000 USD, and this went up to ~20,000 USD at the end of that year. Obviously this was not a sustainable run, the price raised way to fast and quickly, and the drop that happened in 2018, and continued dropping in 2019 was an expected correction in the market. When prices went up to fast, it was not sustainable.
I don’t think the Bitcoin market has high liquidity, and it might also have been manipulated as well. In Japan, and also in Malaysia, we have regulations that monitor the market. So, if you are a whale, you probably do not want to manipulate the market as you risk getting caught or charged later on by the regulation of certain country. So manipulation may only happen in those countries that do not have regulation at this point of time yet. When I got in the market in 2013, the price hit a peak in 2014 at 1000 dollar or so, and it got corrected all the way back to 300 USD in 2015. So there was a huge drop in price. The same pattern happened, and this huge drop in price in 2018 was sort of expected. I was not surprised at all.
Interviewer , Editor : Lina Kamada
【Disclaimer】
The Article published on this our Homepage are only for the purpose of providing information. This is not intended as a solicitation for cryptocurrency trading. Also, this article is the author’s personal opinions, and this does not represent opinion for the Company BTCBOX co.,Ltd.