I’m not going to disrespect anyone here, but when you look at the leaderboards of crypto ranking sites, they’re a bit unnatural. In case you didn’t already realize it, this is about Coinmarketcap, Coingecko, and similar sites.
There is a huge and very appalling problem that is currently propagating around the entire cryptocurrency industry. It is that these lists can get so large, but the bottom 99% of these lists are dead “pig-coins”. And that’s putting it in a nice way. The truth is, most of the unknown coins are just butchered pigs or about-to-be-butchered pigs.
That’s bad news for people who just want to see what are the top 10 cryptos this year or a similar time frame. And that’s not happening this year. Especially with all the garbage that is on crypto leaderboards now. So why are these crypto leaderboards like that, anyway?
Why do crypto leaderboards list so many dead coins?
If you ask me, the answer is for historical reasons… I guess. But at a certain point, a coin becomes non-functional, and it should be relegated to museum archives and history. Besides, it’s not like anyone’s going to search for them anyway. Actually, that’s completely wrong.
When bounty hunters and other small-time gold diggers go to leaderboards to search for the top cryptocurrencies to buy, the websites usually sort them by market cap. Market cap basically means the price of the coin multiplied by its total supply. It is a metric that people use to see how big a coin is.
The problem comes when you only consider the market cap by itself and not how it has changed over time. When you look at a two-dimensional graph of the market cap plotted against time, it allows you to see just how good the crypto has been over its lifetime. You would be able to see spikes where the market cap goes really high and then drops back to earth.
This kind of graph can easily identify rug-pull projects that just go up for 3 days and then go down to zero. It is not really a measure that protects investors, but it allows crypto leaderboards to remove most of the pig-coins from their website.
What is the solution?
There is a very easy solution to this, actually. Instead of listing the coins as a table, you can list them as a line graph of market cap. You can also make a line graph of price changes, with a percentage scale. 100% or just “1” being the starting price of the day, month or other period, and the other vertical numbers representing gains and losses. “(1-y)% loss or (y-1)% gains”, to be specific.
And most crucially – you can sort the table by “highest median market cap (month)” or other period. This should actually be the default sort option because it’ll tell us more accurately which coins are here to stay. Here it is important to use “median” and not “average” for sorting because averages can be distorted by price spikes.
How do you think we should break the “reality distortion field” of crypto leaderboards?
Let’s say you were the product manager of one of the most powerful crypto leaderboards such as Coinmarketcap for a week. How would you hide all of the rugpulls and pump-dumps and show who’s truly top material. Let me know here, or just send me an email.
