How Binance’s Acquisition Could Affect CoinMarketCap

CoinMarketCap.com (CMC) is the most popular crypto data aggregator, drawing some 207.2 million visitors in the last six months, according to data from SimilarWeb. It has established itself as the go-to crypto platform for every investor or trader of cryptocurrencies.

Another giant in the cryptoverse is undoubtedly Binance – a company that developed a large ecosystem consisting of exchanges, fin-tech academy, investment board for support and development of fin-tech startups, a Dapps blockchain platform, a charity foundation and a research platform amongst others so it came as no surprise when earlier this month came the announcement that CMC is being acquired by Binance in a bid that is reportedly amounting to a whopping 400 million dollars.

Binance drew 113.8 million visitors in the last six months which means CoinMarketCap’s traffic is 80% greater and this might be the main reason for this buyout. Clearly the goal is to tap into the biggest crypto traffic there is. And it makes perfect sense.

Binance is looking to become the biggest crypto platform and so far it has succeeded in battling out stiff competition despite only being on the market since 2017. Most of its competitors were already established for years before it, but as US regulators cracked down hard on US based exchanges like Bitfinex, Bittrex and Poloniex, Binance benefited a lot from being based out of Asia. It has changed its base a few times since, and in 2019 it was forced to launch a separate website portal for its US customers but that didn’t affect its popularity and continuous growth.

In addition to that, Binance has been on an acquisition spree lately. The crypto exchange acquired at least 9 firms last year, but only a few were announced publicly. These include Trust Wallet (which is now the official Binance wallet), blockchain data startup DappReview, the Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX and a little-known Seychelles-based derivatives platform JEX.

Earlier this year, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) shared his excitement about two upcoming acquisitions that he was extremely proud of. These were going to have major impact according to him and I’m sure CMC is one of them.

CoinMarketCap reports around 2 million daily visits but has not had an entirely smooth sail. It was founded in 2013 by the anonymous Brandon Chez in Delaware, U.S. and for the most part it has managed to stay impartial to centralized control or influence in respect to its coin listings and data analytics. However, it has often been accused of reporting false trading volumes for many cryptocurrencies and in 2017 it became a contributor to the advance of one of the biggest crypto scams when it listed a dubious project called Bitconnect. This gave credibility to the coin which many had already called out as a plain-right scam coin. The project was supposedly using trading profits to pay out unrealistically high staking rewards and failed apart within its first year, proving that it was built on a fraudulent model.
This drove many experienced traders and investors to alternative websites with more accurate metrics and the traffic of CMC has dropped since then, but only by little.

Today it is still the most visited crypto website, ranking as 561th most popular on Alexa. In comparison, its biggest competition, Coingecko.com ranks at 7,790th most popular and CoinCap.io is far behind at 42,196.

It is fair to say that the announcement of this acquisition was met with mixed feelings in the crypto community. Many users took to Twitter and Reddit to express their surprise, disappointment and concern that CMC will no longer preserve its non-biased approach to listings and other data.

What is the future of CMC is unclear right now. Many are speculating that this is a step against its neutrality but I personally don’t think that it will benefit Binance to alienate the users of CMC. Surely it will be bad for business if there is bias in the decision-making when adding new listings or with the metrics that people use on a daily basis and Binance are well aware of that, they are subjected to scrutiny pretty much on a daily basis and I can’t see how they would risk CMC’s credibility.

One thing is for sure, with a price tag of $400 million, CMC is certainly a force to be reckoned with. This is one of the largest crypto deals so far, on par with the acquisition of Poloniex by Circle a couple of years back (for about the same amount of dollars) and Coinbase’s acquicistion of Earn.com for $120 million in 2019.