CoinGecko

CoinGecko is a price and market-data aggregator. It pulls tickers from exchanges, computes one price per coin, and publishes market cap, volume, supply and exchange listings for each. Its about page claims 21,641+ coins across 1,500+ exchanges, over 200 million monthly page views and more than 10 billion API calls a month. It never takes custody of anything: there is no trading, no deposit and no wallet connection needed to use it.

Bobby Ong and TM Lee started it on 8 April 2014. The team works from Kuala Lumpur, while the contracting entity in its terms of service is Gecko Labs Pte. Ltd., registered in Singapore. It has stayed founder-run and independent for twelve years, which is unusual now: its main rival, CoinMarketCap, has been owned by Binance since 2020. That independence is part of why apps and news sites, this one included, use CoinGecko as a neutral source of one price per coin.

People searching "coingecko terminal" usually mean GeckoTerminal. It is the place to look for tokens that trade only on DEXes and have not been added to the main CoinGecko listings yet, which covers most brand-new launches.

The sale. In January 2026 CoinDesk reported that CoinGecko had hired the bank Moelis to find a buyer at around $500 million. Two days later Ong said the firm is "growing, profitable" and evaluating "strategic opportunities", without confirming a deal. CoinDesk also cited a fall in web traffic, from 43.5 million monthly visitors in 2024 to about 18.5 million in December 2025, as AI assistants answer more price questions directly. The two traffic numbers measure different things (CoinGecko's own claim is page views, CoinDesk's is unique visitors), but the direction is clear, and it bears on what a buyer would pay for. Ong's own pitch to buyers leans on institutional demand for its data, not on the website. As of 27 September 2026 we found no announced buyer.

Its only acquisition on record is Zash, an NFT data company, in November 2023. CoinGecko called it its "first-ever acquisition".

CoinGecko publishes its method, and it is more careful than a simple average of exchanges:

1. 01Take up to the 600 highest-volume tickers for the coin across tracked exchanges.
2. 02Drop outliers using a median absolute deviation test: tickers whose price falls outside the bounds are excluded.
3. 03Compute a volume-weighted average price from what remains.

The outlier step is what keeps a single broken ticker, say a thin pair on a small exchange printing a price 30% off, from dragging the headline price. It works well for coins that trade on many venues. For a token with two or three thin markets there is little to average, and one venue can still set the price.

Market cap is that price times circulating supply. Supply is the weak link: CoinGecko says it gets circulating supply from the token teams and verifies it, subtracting locked tokens using team data and block explorers. For a new token with complicated vesting, the market cap on CoinGecko is partly the project's own claim.

Volume is the other soft number. Exchange volume excludes pairs CoinGecko has blacklisted for inconsistent data, and its Trust Score rates pairs on order-book spread and depth, web traffic and outliers, and rates exchanges from 1 to 10 on liquidity, regulation, cybersecurity, past incidents and proof of reserves. None of that stops an exchange reporting inflated trades. Use volume to compare venues, not as an audited total. Our trading tools rating marks this down for the whole aggregator category, not CoinGecko alone.

On 2 September 2026 CoinGecko announced that its exchange cybersecurity score now runs on CORE3, an outside security-rating provider, rather than its own assessment.

CoinGecko says its API serves more than 10 billion calls a month. It is how a large share of crypto apps, bots, wallets and sites get their prices, and a big reason CoinGecko's numbers show up everywhere. Pricing counts one request as one credit regardless of how much data comes back. Plans on 27 September 2026:

To size a plan: a dashboard refreshing 20 coin prices every minute with one request per coin uses about 864,000 credits a month, past Analyst and into Lite territory. The same dashboard batching all 20 coins into one request per minute uses about 43,000 and fits in Basic. Batching matters more than the plan choice. The free Demo key requires a "Data provided by CoinGecko" credit on whatever you build. CoinGecko says it holds more than eight years of historical data, and historical data is what people most often search the API documentation for. Keyless requests still work for light testing but are throttled hard. This site's market pages run on CoinGecko data, and a burst of a few keyless calls in a row returns HTTP 429 (too many requests) within seconds.

Yes, as a data site. CoinGecko never holds your money or asks for exchange API keys, so the main risk is not the site but people impersonating it. Its record:

• June 2024 data breach. An attacker got into an employee account at GetResponse, CoinGecko's email provider, exported 1,916,596 contacts (names, emails, IP addresses, plan data) and sent 23,723 phishing emails offering a fake token airdrop. Passwords were not exposed.
• How the phishing worked. The 23,723 fake airdrop emails went out through a different GetResponse customer's account, using CoinGecko's exported list. The addresses were real CoinGecko subscribers, so the emails looked well targeted even though CoinGecko's own systems were not breached.
• No token. In that notice CoinGecko wrote that it has no officially issued coins or tokens. Any "CoinGecko airdrop" is a scam.
• SOC 2 Type 2. An independent audit by Sensiba tested its security, availability and confidentiality controls over July to September 2025. The report itself goes only to enterprise clients.

A coin being listed on CoinGecko is not an endorsement. The site lists tokens that meet its listing criteria, including thinly traded ones, and GeckoTerminal shows any pool that trades on-chain. Check the contract address on the coin page against the project's own site before buying anything you found there.