A massively-trafficked crypto price tracker whose coin rankings run on market-cap data, but critics say its 2020 acquisition by Binance and a ranking tweak that favored its new owner cloud its independence.
What it's really for A crypto market-data site; rankings are by market cap, with paid fast-track listings on the side.
What our grade covers The grade on this page is about its market-cap rankings of coins and exchanges, not everything the site does.
High Scoring Confidence Checked against primary sources. We are confident in the facts and the grade here.
Crypto projects and exchanges pay the most via paid "CMC Priority" fast-track processing (reported at roughly $5,000 for coins and $50,000 for exchanges), but per CoinMarketCap's own documentation this only updates profile attributes like logos and socials and does not change a project's rank.
Source →- Operating since
- 2013 (13 years) · source
- What it costs you
- Free to read The reviews are free to read.
- How they make money
- Makes money from display advertising, API subscriptions, and paid fast-track listing services, plus its value to parent company Binance.
- What they do
- Aggregates prices, trading volume, supply, and market capitalization across thousands of cryptocurrencies and exchanges and ranks them, primarily by market cap.
- What to watch for
- Coin rank is driven by market-cap data rather than sold, but the site is owned by exchange Binance, and reporting notes its core volume figures have historically relied on numbers exchanges report about themselves.
- Composite score
- 1.90 / 5.00 → grade C-
How the grade was reached
Does the site take money from the very entities it ranks? Pay-for-placement, vendor-funded data, and affiliate commissions all pull this down. The less the ranking can be bought, the higher the score.
What is the ranking actually built on? Hands-on testing scores highest, then verified first-hand reviews, then opinion or popularity surveys and self-reported figures, then pay-to-rank, which scores lowest.
Is the methodology published, specific, and reproducible? Can a reader see how a given rank was reached, or is it a black box?
Are commercial relationships, sponsorships, and affiliate arrangements disclosed clearly and near the rankings themselves, rather than buried?
How hard is it to game? Controls against fake reviews, solicited reviews, and vendor gaming raise this; an open box anyone can stuff lowers it.
Evidence
- CoinMarketCap was founded in 2013 by Brandon Chez in New York City, and in April 2020 was acquired by cryptocurrency exchange Binance for an undisclosed amount that Forbes estimated at around $400 million. Source: Wikipedia →
- A month after the Binance deal, CoinMarketCap changed its exchange-ranking algorithm to default to a new 'Web Traffic Factor' over its prior liquidity score, after which Binance jumped to the top spot; rival executives and critics called it a partnership with a clear conflict of interest. Source: Cointelegraph →
- CMC Priority (CMCP) is a paid fast-track service that buys turnaround-time certainty for non-automated updates, but CMC states it applies only to attributes (e.g. socials, website, logos) that do not affect rank, preserving the ranking system's integrity. Source: CoinMarketCap Support →