CoinGecko is an invaluable resource to aid your DYOR process. It has a plethora of features that makes for compelling reading: useful articles, ranking of coins and exchanges, and market charts. As a leading cryptocurrency data aggregator, it helpfully tracks more than 13,000 cryptocurrencies across 500+ exchanges worldwide. Some of you may still be diligently collecting your candies every day, even if you don’t quite know what to do with them.

Recently, CoinGecko organised an AMA session on R/cryptocurrency. Yes, the burning question on your mind was asked by many users: will the candies have any monetary value besides the discounts on CoinGecko? And no, the team has no immediate plans to turn your candies into cryptocurrency. Some of you may lose interest in my article at this point in time, but others may still want to continue reading these:

1. If you are wondering about its business model, CoinGecko makes money from four sources: advertising, affiliates, API subscriptions (https://www.coingecko.com/en/api) and Premium subscriptions (https://www.coingecko.com/premium)
2. Its multi-pronged money-making strategy enables it to remain as a self-funded and independent entity, free of intervention from investors. This lets it display crypto data impartially.
3. It declined to reveal the criteria that governs its decisions behind listing cryptocurrencies, but did share that it manually checks each token for sufficient liquidity and volume on DEXes as well as any suspicious functions on smart contracts. Sounds like a lot of work on the part of the team!
4. This rigour also applies to the determination of the price of a crypto. Its data aggregation model allows it to collect price data of all the CEX and DEX that carry it and subsequently work out the volume-weighted average price calculation.
5. It has a second product called GeckoTerminal, which lists all tokens traded on DEXes, including the ones with low liquidity and volume. The formidable private API of GeckoTerminal allows it to track over one million tokens.
6. CoinGecko is expanding its reach by hosting NFT conferences. It also includes NFT floor prices and and now has NFTs on Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Klaytn. Curious that Solana hasn’t been added yet since it boasts a thriving NFT marketplace even if its outages are getting to be annoyingly frequent. It did share that it would be adding SOL soon.
7. CoinGecko was named as such because when the founders wanted to launch it back in 2014, they wanted to pair the .com domain with an animal mascot. Only CoinGecko and CoinTeddy were available for registration. Since the word ‘teddy’ reminds people of the bear market, the team decided on ‘CoinGecko’, which is how we came to be greeted by its friendly lizard mascot.