Exclusive Interview: Bobby Ong on Bootstrapping CoinGecko into a Crypto Data Powerhouse

I graduated in 2012 from University College London with a degree in Economics. My first encounter with Bitcoin was through a TechCrunch article in 2013. At the time, I was learning to code and spent a lot of time on tech news boards.

I was immediately captivated by this novel form of digital currency that so many tech enthusiasts were discussing. I made it a point to read the Bitcoin whitepaper and conduct as much research as possible. The more I learned about Bitcoin, the more I saw it as a fascinating piece of technology with immense potential to revolutionize finance. I knew this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get involved with a game-changing technology early on, and I was determined to play a role in the development of this industry.

Through a chance meeting with my co-founder, TM Lee, we both decided to launch CoinGecko in 2014 to bring more transparency to crypto market data. We started CoinGecko because we needed a website that tracked crypto market data in a user-friendly way, and we realized we had the potential and expertise to do it well.

Back in April 2014, when we launched, cryptocurrencies were still a very niche interest. We began by tracking just 20 coins.

We hold the core belief that anything that can be tokenized, will be tokenized. We envision a future where there will be millions of tokens, and CoinGecko was built from the ground up to track this future. Our goal is to provide users with independent and reliable data to help them conduct thorough cryptocurrency research.

We have certainly come a long way and now track over 6,000 cryptocurrencies. We can't wait for the future where there will be millions of tokens!

TM and I are both Malaysians, and we wanted to build a tech company in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We took a contrarian approach when starting CoinGecko by making several decisions that were considered quite radical at the time.

Recognizing that cryptocurrency is a global phenomenon, we decided early on that we wanted to build a company that could serve everyone worldwide. We concluded that building a business to serve only the Malaysian market would be too small, given the massive global opportunity.

We also decided to bootstrap CoinGecko, growing the company through our own efforts without any external venture funding. We were inspired by Basecamp's approach of eschewing venture capital when building tech companies and wanted to see if we could make it work too. Choosing not to raise venture capital gave us the freedom to avoid relocating to Silicon Valley, one of the most expensive places in the world to live.

Being based in Kuala Lumpur, a relatively low-cost location, was certainly a major advantage. We didn't need to raise a lot of money to cover rent or food. We were very conservative in hiring, and for the first 4 years of CoinGecko, it was just TM and me running the show.

Not having venture capital also allowed us to escape the typical 18-24 month VC funding run-rate cycle. It wasn't obvious back then, but the crypto market cycle lasts much longer than 24 months. A crypto winter can last upwards of 36 months, and we saw many companies that raised venture capital in 2014 slowly closing down by the end of 2016. We were fortunate to not face any external pressure to spend investors' money, and we were very prudent with our resources. This allowed us to weather the bear markets of 2015-2016 and 2018-2019 successfully.

We are incredibly proud to have built CoinGecko into the leading cryptocurrency data aggregator in the market. Millions of people rely on our data for their cryptocurrency research, and this gives us a great sense of purpose.

In terms of achievements, we are proud to be the first crypto data aggregator to pioneer several industry standards. For instance, CoinGecko was the first to holistically rank crypto exchanges using our proprietary Trust Score algorithm. This was crucial for accurately ranking exchanges, as many were engaging in wash trading and data manipulation.

CoinGecko was also the first data aggregator to pioneer the dual-chart feature, which is now a common standard across various data platforms.

We also launched with various DeFi yield farming opportunities and introduced the highly requested Portfolio feature on CoinGecko.

We work diligently to ensure that our methodology and data are impartial, accurate, and comprehensive. Users have access to prices for over 6,000 cryptocurrencies sourced from more than 400 exchanges. Furthermore, our API is freely available and is used by numerous prominent projects such as Trezor and MetaMask, among others.

Our research team also conducts deep dives into the crypto space to provide valuable insights to our users through our cryptocurrency reports, publications like our How to DeFi book, and our regular newsletters.

We are focusing heavily on user interface and experience improvements at the moment because we want to provide our users with the best possible experience. We have several features planned for this year, and you will be hearing more about them very soon!

The biggest challenge when building a crypto data aggregator is data integrity. CoinGecko uses a volume-weighted average formula to provide a global price for each cryptocurrency. To achieve this, we collect and process data from various crypto exchange APIs.

New exchanges are created all the time, exchange APIs change frequently, and sometimes exchanges return inaccurate data. We have to build our system to handle all these scenarios to ensure our data remains impartial, neutral, reliable, and independent.

I am very excited about the developments taking place in DeFi. CoinGecko wrote the world's first DeFi book titled How to DeFi. Even though the book is less than a year old, so much has happened since then that we now need to write an updated edition.

I believe we will see massive growth and development in the DeFi space in the coming years. DeFi's composable nature means that many projects are free to build on top of each other, and we will be seeing an explosion of DeFi applications soon.

It wouldn't surprise me if DeFi achieves 100x growth from this point forward as it marches toward mainstream adoption in the coming years.

At the end of 2020, I made 8 crypto predictions on Twitter about what I believe 2021 will look like.

2020 has zoomed by so quickly and it's time for me to give my predictions on the crypto markets in 2021. So here we go, my predictions on what I believe will take place next year:

— Bobby Ong (@bobbyong) Dec 30, 2020

I think 2021 will be a landmark year for Bitcoin as we see more institutions get involved. MicroStrategy started the ball rolling by purchasing over $1 billion worth of Bitcoin, and I believe more large public companies will soon hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets. I am also very optimistic about Ethereum and believe 2021 will finally see a Layer 2 scalability solution achieve mainstream adoption. I think other Layer 1 platforms will find it difficult to compete against Ethereum, but I will be keeping my eyes on Polkadot and Solana to see if they can gain adoption as they advance on their DeFi journeys as well.

I would say the biggest obstacle for mainstream crypto adoption is the user experience aspect. Using decentralized applications is still quite a daunting experience for first-time users. I hope that as we progress further, crypto decentralized apps will become more user-friendly, allowing us to easily onboard more mainstream users.

This might sound controversial, but not every crypto project needs to have a token. Each project should dedicate sufficient time to research and design proper utility and tokenomics before simply launching a token. If there is no clear use case, then perhaps there isn’t really a need for a token at all.