CoinGecko Logo

CoinGecko was launched in April 2014 by Malaysian founder TM Lee and Bobby Ong, who had met in Singapore in late 2013. Both were interested in crypto and saw a gap in market data. Existing platforms offered limited metrics or unreliable figures, while CoinGecko started with $100 and tracked only 20 coins.

From the beginning, CoinGecko was built as more than a price tracker. Alongside price, trading volume, and market capitalization, it measured GitHub activity, community growth, liquidity, and other non-financial indicators. This made it different from CoinMarketCap, which was founded a year earlier and focused mainly on price data.

The founders refused venture capital after watching many funded crypto startups disappear during the 2015–2016 bear market. Based in Kuala Lumpur, they kept costs low and ran the company themselves for the first four years. After the 2018–2019 downturn, CoinGecko began hiring. In May 2019, it launched Trust Score after Bitwise told the SEC that about 95% of reported crypto trading volume was fake. Trust Score ranked exchanges by web traffic, order book depth, and trading activity, with Trust Score 2.0 following in September 2019.

In April 2020, Binance bought CoinMarketCap for about $400 million, raising questions about market data owned by a major exchange. Part of the audience moved to CoinGecko as an independent alternative. In 2021, it became one of the ten most visited financial websites and published the “How to DeFi” books. In January 2023, Trust Score 3.0 added exchange reserve data after the collapse of FTX.