Q2: A Journey of Struggle and Progress at CoinMarketCap – A Letter From Our CEO

From Carylyne Chan, CEO

Dear CoinMarketCap Community,

It’s been three months since our last letter to you with the big news about our acquisition, and I’d like to share some thoughts about how we’ve been faring in this past quarter. As one of the major entities in the crypto space, we are cognizant of our position and I want to try to be as transparent with you as we develop and advance.

Progress This Quarter
This quarter, our team made great progress in both fixing issues that we know have been plaguing us for a long time, and investing in innovative new features we hope will build the foundation of the next phase of CoinMarketCap.

Better Rankings
First of all, we launched our new market pair ranking and exchange ranking. The unique challenge of being CoinMarketCap is threefold: (1) We need to build solutions which are applicable to all market pairs and exchanges on CoinMarketCap, (2) We want to create solutions which are statistically sound and provable, and (3) They need to be easy to grasp.

The new rankings are an effort in the making for the last two years at CoinMarketCap. We have done the necessary data science and research to first create our Liquidity Metric and Score, and we have now generalized these into a new Confidence indicator that accurately applies to all market pairs and exchanges. For me, this is a small dream come true — now, excuse me while I quietly shed a tear :’)

Socializing on CoinMarketCap
This quarter, we also extended CoinMarketCap accounts on to our site, which enables you to save your watchlist (never lose a watchlist while clearing cookies again!) and pick a username on CoinMarketCap.

We launched our new CoinMarketCap Chat, which has essentially turned CoinMarketCap from a one-player price-checking experience into a multiplayer experience where you can chat with peers around the world about price movements. Chat has become an integral part of CoinMarketCap, with the feature becoming one of our top 10 most popular features within the first week of launch.

To mark the launch of Chat, we’ve also run two AMAs so far with Charlie Shrem and Roger Ver (who gave out lots of BCH during the AMA) and will continue to do so over the next few months. Don’t miss your chance to interact live with your favorite crypto celebs directly on CoinMarketCap — bookmark the schedule here.

Over time, we will continue to add more social and interactive features to CoinMarketCap, so make sure you reserve your desired username before someone picks it before you!

Improving Our Data
Apart from making the experience on CoinMarketCap even more immersive, we are improving the guts of CoinMarketCap as well, by refactoring a lot of our backend infrastructure and data collection systems to ensure that you continue to get the best data on CoinMarketCap.

One of the top requests is for CoinMarketCap to update prices faster and more automatically, and we are working to make sure that will be possible in the near future.

Having More Fun Overall
Who can forget the beautiful curves that CoinMarketCap unveiled on April 1 early in the quarter?

We also organized a virtual BBQ party for the CoinMarketCap brand on our seventh birthday, and collected some choice cuts on this page. The top comment is also by none other than our first AMA guest on the brand-new Chat product, Charlie Shrem.

All in all, our team continues to showcase that it’s possible to work hard and do serious work while still having fun! If you are interested in joining our team, we also have a number of open positions at CoinMarketCap we’re hoping to fill with the right candidates.

New Approaches
Given that this is a new era for CoinMarketCap in its growth, I’m excited to lead the team with new approaches that I believe will ensure CoinMarketCap continues to grow with the crypto industry and with you, our user, in mind.

Constant Iteration, Constant Improvement
CoinMarketCap has always stuck to launching products as high fidelity and as close to being fully fleshed out as possible, meaning that we usually take a very long time to ship new things on our site or app.

To ensure that we can keep pace with our constantly evolving industry, we are adopting a new iterative approach to ship initial prototypes on the site as quickly as possible. Once these initial products, or minimum viable products (MVPs), are out in the wild, we gather feedback from our users to improve the next versions, iterating it into a better form.

Overall, this constant cycle of improvement should get you new products that you’re interested in quickly, and help us to serve you better, with your feedback about these products in hand. A recent example of a quick launch includes our new DeFi page, which we’re now already working on enhancing.

Responding Directly With Better Products and Methodologies
As an extension of the principle above, we are working to be as responsive as possible to user feedback by not only understanding product usage, but actually gathering structured feedback as well. We have run multiple surveys on our site and social channels (thank you all who have participated!) and are using these responses to craft our next improvements on the site.

Other than making sure that we answer as many of your questions on our social and support channels as possible, we are focusing on designing solutions within our products and methodologies to address them fundamentally as well. You will see more changes and improvements being made to the site/apps and our methodology in the coming quarter as we continue to incorporate your feedback.

Simplify and Streamline
Last but not least, we want to continue keeping the experience on CoinMarketCap as simple and streamlined as possible. When CoinMarketCap started, it was just a page with a few cryptoassets ranked by market cap. Over the last seven years, we’ve expanded to many other types of data and content as the industry moved and evolved.

CoinMarketCap circa 2013

Over the last two years at CoinMarketCap, I have personally launched a multitude of products with our team, but we’re now reaching a point where we need to make these products tie together elegantly and work together effectively. In order for us to fulfill our vision of “showcasing the crypto revolution,” we now need to make our data and products simple, discoverable and easy-to-adopt — something that I know many of us as users of CoinMarketCap would like to see, sticking to the original “simple” design ethos while still displaying an increasingly complex set of information.

Over the next quarter, you will see many changes we’ll be making to improve your user and browsing experience on CoinMarketCap. We welcome your suggestions about how we can improve on integrating all our products together, and hope you’ll keep sharing your thoughts about the changes we’ll put on the site and apps!

Next Quarter
To follow up on a few promises that we made previously — first, we have soft-launched our self-reporting dashboard for projects, a concept we first introduced as part of our Data Accountability & Transparency Alliance. Increasingly, we will be working with projects and exchanges to self-report many more data points to ensure that you, as a CoinMarketCap user, will be able to have all the information at hand when making your own decisions about what to trade or where to trade. The self-reporting dashboard will be rolling out in full force within this next quarter.

Second, I mentioned having more ways to interact on the site with additional tags, upvoting/downvoting and more. This continues to be in the works, and we continue to build off the back of our successful accounts and chat launches to figure out a way to make these actions even more fun and engaging for you as an end user.

Another pertinent theme for us in the following quarter is to ensure that CoinMarketCap can fulfill its role in the crypto community by bringing more awareness around the issues in the space. We launched an MVP of Headlines, a news-focused product this quarter, and will roll out an improved version of it very soon that will make your reading experience even more pleasurable and informative.

Beyond just working within the crypto space, we hope to help us all within the crypto community to “cross the chasm” to a larger majority of users in the world with our continued focus on partnerships and content. As you recall, we have brought crypto data to Yahoo Finance, and we will continue to ensure that more of what we do touches an even wider audience out there. There are several exciting updates in this sphere which we’ll announce soon, so make sure you keep your eyes peeled!

CoinMarketCap as a Force for Good in Crypto
At the heart of it, our entire team continues to be dedicated to bringing our vision of showcasing the crypto revolution to life. Undoubtedly, there have been questions and skepticism about CoinMarketCap’s place in crypto after our acquisition, but the team at CoinMarketCap continues to stay the course in what we believe in — making crypto as an industry and an asset class more discoverable and more efficient, and doing everything we can to make sure we continue to be a force for good in the crypto community.

The changes I’ve outlined above have been hard-fought and a large part of our team has been working 12-16 hour days to ensure that we can continue to ship these new features and improvements to you. But what keeps us all going is to prove that CoinMarketCap can continue to build what we believe our users need, and the encouragement and feedback from our users has been fuel when things get tough around here.

As always, I encourage your skepticism and your constructive criticism, and only time and our new and renewed efforts to build CoinMarketCap to become a better version of itself will tell. Until then, reach out to us on all our channels — our doors are open, and we are always glad to hear from you, even if it’s to call us out. Let’s build the future of our crypto revolution together!

Sincerely,
Carylyne

Originally published on the CMC blog on June 30, 2020.