How CoinStats Became a Leading Crypto Portfolio Tracker: An Interview with Founder Narek Gevorgyan

I have an engineering background. I used to work as a software developer for a large corporation. Following that, I ran Inomma for three years before starting CoinStats. Inomma was a software development as a service agency, where we served Silicon Valley startups with their engineering needs. During that period, we also developed and pivoted our own product ideas, launching about four products (which, for various reasons, didn't succeed).

I entered the crypto space after seeing the massive gains in Ripple (XRP) back in May 2017. If I recall correctly, it surged by around 20x during that time. I just decided to get on board.

It was the summer of 2017. I had invested in several cryptocurrencies myself and found I was constantly opening my MacBook to manually calculate my portfolio's dollar value because the market was so volatile. I thought to myself, there has to be an app for this. I downloaded all the apps available back then, but they all seemed overly complicated for a crypto newbie like me. So, we took a week to build a very straightforward app using free third-party APIs, where you input how much you own of each cryptocurrency, and it shows your total net worth.

I think we unintentionally developed an app for newbies (because we were too), and it turned out that 95% of people in crypto at that time were newbies just like us. It took about three months before we started getting thousands of organic downloads just by using some basic App Store optimization tactics and a referral program.

After that, we started taking CoinStats more seriously and eventually moved the entire Inomma team to work on it full-time. Today, we connect to over 300 exchanges for price updates, have a massive and secure backend to support millions of users, and offer one of the best products on the market.

CoinStats is significantly easier to use while being feature-rich, with most of our features available for free. Some competitors claim to be completely free, but in reality, the services they offer are also free within the CoinStats app.

I believe the top feature that sets us apart is the ability to connect all your wallets and exchange accounts (you can connect your hardware wallets in under 10 seconds). You then receive automatic notifications whenever something happens on your accounts, from major price changes to order fills on your exchange. On top of that, we offer an instant swap feature on your connected exchange account, allowing you to easily swap any coin for another with the best available rate, even when they don't have a direct trading pair.

Furthermore, we have worked very hard to make our news feed relevant and useful 24/7. We are partnered with around 10 news agencies that manually curate the best news stories to show our users at the right time.

Portfolio Analytics, transaction notifications, order fill notifications, wallet alerts, etc. These are all fairly self-explanatory, but one PRO feature we released recently and I personally love is CoinStats Insights. We aggregate data and provide a bird's-eye view of what's happening with each of the top 50 coins, such as a coin's dominance in CoinStats portfolios or the percentage of users who sold/bought that coin in the last 24 hours. Sometimes we find a surprising correlation between CoinStats Insights and market prices.

We have a grand vision to become an all-in-one gateway to cryptocurrency. We want to create a seamless user experience for people to get started with crypto, store their coins in the wallet of their choice, easily buy/sell from their preferred exchange, and track their investments—all from a single, easy-to-use interface.

Right now, the biggest challenge is that the market is still relatively small, and not many new people are entering. On top of that, the competition is huge compared to the market size. I believe this will change next year as we see further developments in the blockchain space.

I’m excited about pretty much any DeFi product, like blockchain-based loans. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are staggering as well. I believe people will tokenize almost any asset, starting from real estate and ending with stars in the sky.

Disclaimer: This was a historical prediction and does not constitute financial advice. Reflecting on his 2020 outlook, he noted that he told his friends they would see BTC at $80,000 that year. Citing developments like Bakkt's launch and the impending Bitcoin halving, he believed various charts and technical analysis suggested another bull run was on the horizon. Of course, if BTC went up, he expected a handful of altcoin prices to rise depending on their individual progress.

We already saw one wave of mainstream adoption in January 2018; almost everyone in the world was talking about crypto. CoinStats was a top-searched keyword on the US app store. However, that was driven purely by hype and didn't last long. For true, sustainable mainstream adoption, we just need one single DApp that showcases the main advantage of blockchain over centralized technologies and is used by millions of people. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like that ready right now.