2021 is just getting started — but what did CoinMarketCap do in 2020, and what is there to look forward to?
Dear CoinMarketCap users,
It’s finally 2021, and it’s almost like 2020 never existed — Bitcoin’s thrilling all-time highs that it seems to break every single day have almost wiped away the disaster that was 2020 (key word here: almost).
Here at CoinMarketCap, we are as bullish on the new year as we could possibly be, and it’s due to a lot more than the price of the top crypto.
In the past year, CoinMarketCap has gone through an acquisition by Binance, faked out Crypto Twitter with our pun-nily named Toilet Paper Token, rode the DeFi wave and now have coasted into 2021 with record-breaking price jumps from cryptocurrencies across our home page.
2020 was a year of soul-searching for a lot of the world — a global pandemic ground normal life to a halt, and many people began working from home and struggling with how to live in a world where travel stopped, restaurants became taboo and it was dangerous to hug your family.
2020 was also the year when cryptocurrencies became the biggest topic of the financial markets. From the wild gains and insanely creative projects in the decentralized finance space in the DeFi Summer, to Bitcoin’s aforementioned meteoric rise at the very close of 2020, CoinMarketCap has been watching just as much interest as you all.
And we haven’t just been watching — CoinMarketCap has also been constantly thinking of new ways that your trusty crypto price aggregator can support all crypto seekers during our new reality.
After the acquisition, CoinMarketCap was under huge pressure on social media. We sincerely thank those who care about CoinMarketCap for giving constructive criticism. We are not a perfect company, not even close. However, we have been thriving to provide unbiased, high quality and accurate crypto information to our users. This is why, despite the noise, our entire team was heads down on polishing our product in the past year as that is what we would like to be judged by.
We (Truly) Put Users’ Needs First
One of the biggest steps that we took (and if you saw our former ad revenue, you’d know how big it really is) was to remove all banner ads from the CoinMarketCap website. A dislike of banner ads is something that pretty much everyone can relate to — but at the same time, companies do need a little thing called money in order to stay afloat.
However, at CoinMarketCap, we made the decision in 2020 to prioritize our user experience above all else. Removing banner ads removes a big distraction for our users, as well as speeds up the site — with no banner ads, you can see the price of Bitcoin that much faster.
As part of CoinMarketCap’s plan to focus on improving our user experience, we also recently gave both our homepage and our coin details pages a fresh look. You no longer have to refresh our homepages to see prices — it refreshes for you, live. And at the top of the coin details page, all of the data that our users need is now available in a friendly view, and you can more easily add your favorite coins to your watchlist.
To improve our user experience on the CoinMarketCap mobile app, we have also introduced live price auto-refresh as well as added new DeFi and storage categories. We know that the DeFi summer wave brought decentralized finance tokens to the top of everyone’s minds, while the launch of long-awaited decentralized storage projects like Filecoin brought a little sparkle to the not obviously exciting storage space.
Beyond just new designs, CoinMarketCap also iterated on the site’s exchange rankings criteria as part of the goal of presenting the most accurate data possible. This spring, CoinMarketCap improved upon the liquidity metric, as well as included web traffic as a ranking factor, in order to maintain the high quality of data we are known for. We also introduced our confidence score for the market pairs of each cryptocurrency, which can help traders make informed decisions about where to buy crypto.
Learn Crypto, Earn Crypto, Then Learn More Crypto
One of CoinMarketCap’s guiding principles is our aim to showcase the cryptocurrency revolution — and 2020 was definitely a revolutionary year for crypto.
What better way to show the world what’s been happening in crypto than to support crypto education? A revolution has to start somewhere, and informing the world about what cryptocurrency really is is one of the first steps.
With this in mind, 2020 also brought you CoinMarketCap Earn, a way for those interested in crypto to earn money (in that crypto) while learning. Who doesn’t love free money? We know that you do! Sometimes adding a little incentive goes a long way. CoinMarketCap Earn saw over 120,000 visitors a week learn about top projects such as Band Protocol, Terra and The Graph.
Take the financial incentive away, and CoinMarketCap brought our users another way to learn about crypto in 2020 — CMC Academy.
Picture the library of Academy, which housed almost all of the books ever written during its time, then picture the library online, then picture those books replaced with articles about cryptocurrency — and you’ve got CMC Academy. From those just getting started in crypto, to more experienced crypto users wanting to dig into new projects, CMC Academy had you covered.
Here are some of our favorite CMC Academy articles that 2020 brought us:
- The Perennial Question: Should I Invest in Bitcoin or Altcoins? CMC’s research team dives into this age-old question.
- A Dive Into Ethereum 2.0 A timely read since the ETH 2.0 December launch.
- What Is Decentralized Finance?: A Deep Dive by The Defiant This needs no introduction!
It’s just the first week of 2021 and Bitcoin has already broken $34,000 once — who knows what the rest of the year has in store?
Happy new year, stay inside, wear a mask, and get ready for a year of ATHs!- CoinMarketCap
