Calling All Writers: Learn What The Crypto-API Writing Contest Is All About From The CoinGecko Team

In this AMA, we discuss the ongoing writing contest, Crypto-API and the main topics for the HackerNoon writer community: whether you're discussing the value of cryptocurrency data APIs, highlighting industry leaders like the CoinGecko API, offering tutorials, sharing integration experiences, exploring use cases, or related topics, we want to hear from you!

See the writing prompts here and share your story to win from $1000!

Soon Aik Chiew leads Product at CoinGecko, with 3 years of extensive experience in the crypto industry and over 10 years in Product. He currently drives all CoinGecko API product initiatives, focusing on enhancing the API product across public, self-serve and enterprise solutions.

Bringing 10 years of marketing experience spanning from MNCs to startups, Julia Ng is currently the Growth Lead at CoinGecko and spearheads strategic growth and marketing initiatives for CoinGecko and its API.

In this AMA, Soon Aik and Julia share everything about:

This Slogging thread by Mónica Freitas, Julia Ng, Soon Aik Chiew, Asher Umerie, Sheharyar Khan, Adrian Morales and Jose Hernandez occurred in slogging's official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability.

Hi Julia Ng and Soon Aik Chiew! Thank you for joining us! I'd like to start by asking you a bit about yourselves, your background and involvement with APIs.

Hi everyone! Julia here from CoinGecko. I am currently leading Growth Marketing at CoinGecko and previously worked at companies like Sephora (SEA division), TripAdvisor, and a startup called Yours Skincare. I come from a Marketing Communications background and started out in the Advertising/Events agency side of things.

In terms of my experience around API, I joined the CoinGecko API team at the start of Q3 last year. It's been exciting to work closely with Soon Aik Chiew, our Product Lead for API and the rest of the team. Happy to be able to share more about our API with the Hackernoon community today 🙌

That's an interesting background, Julia Ng.
How are you finding the process of growing the recognition and usage of CoinGecko's API? What are you most excited to show people and what are the biggest challenges in raising adoption?

Great that you asked! On growing recognition and usage—within the crypto industry, CoinGecko is a global crypto data authority and powerhouse, given its inception many bull and bear market cycles ago in 2014. Most of what you see on CoinGecko (http://www.coingecko.com - on both web and app) and our sister DEX aggregator and tracker, GeckoTerminal (http://www.geckoterminal.com) are accessible via our crypto data API.

In other words, we have found a product market fit within the crypto industry, where new crypto projects, dApps (decentralized apps), wallets, and so on, seek us out for our enterprise-grade, aggregated crypto price and market data, metadata, on-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) data.

As such, when it comes to increasing adoption, our primary challenge is reaching new users outside of the industry, where our brand may be lesser known, as well as out-competing other crypto data providers by continually innovating on our product, and ensuring we serve our market with the data they are looking for, in the most accurate, timely and comprehensive way possible.

Also hence our Writing Contest and this AMA with Hackernoon! Haha

Hi Monica and everyone, thanks for having us! Feel free to call me SA. I'm currently based in Malaysia, so if anyone is visiting, holla!

I've spent the last decade in the tech industry, initially as a UX consultant and later transitioning to a tech product role. API is a rather new initiative at CoinGecko, and it's been a learning curve since managing such a product was new to me. We're constantly absorbing community feedback, which helps us improve and better serve our users.

It keeps me awake at night, thinking about how to enhance our API to empower others—whether it’s aiding in their financial decision-making or enabling them to deliver new financial innovations. Seeing how our API has empowered developers, hobbyists, and enterprises globally is truly exciting. We can't wait to talk more with y'all!

Fun trip! Soon Aik Chiew for those who don't know, can you explain what CoinGecko's API is? What are some of its use cases?

Re: What is CoinGecko API and some of its use cases
CoinGecko API (http://www.coingecko.com/api) allows you to programmatically obtain a wide range of crypto market data like live prices, market cap, trading volume, historical data, metadata (images, categories) and much more.

Aside from building crypto data analytics apps and portfolio trackers (like CoinGecko), it is common for projects to use our API and provide live market data to their users, enriching their apps with historical price chart data, metadata and more. Many hobbyists also like to use our API data on Google Sheets / Excel, to keep track of their portfolio holdings or research for investment opportunities.

There are a lot more unique use cases like chatbots and oracles, here are some references that might be useful:

Adding on to Soon Aik’s point, the use cases for CoinGecko API span from individual/personal use to crypto projects and research institutions. For instance:

I’ve added some images here for easy reference.

Julia Ng, interesting... I assume reaching people outside of crypto with an API is the hardest part of it all
What trends have you noticed when it comes to dapps adoption and crypto adoption in general? What place can CoinGecko's API occupy in the current crypto industry?

In terms of trends, crypto is a very sentiment- and narrative-driven industry. There is a noticeable uptick in API sign-ups/usage when crypto is in a bull market, simply because new projects and innovations (like new blockchain layer protocols) emerge as a result of the bullishness.

Quite recently, memecoins have been pumping, which has resulted in a resurgence of Telegram trading bots. Telegram crypto trading bots give traders an edge because it is able to execute trades at a faster speed than connecting manually to a DEX. Such Telegram bots may then rely on on-chain DEX data endpoints in our API to retrieve the price and market data.

On the topic of on-chain DEX data—we’d like to highlight that it is our newest offering and one that has been gaining traction since its launch 2 months ago! Key data sets include crypto liquidity pools, token data by contract address and OHLCV chart data. :star-struck:

For those who are keen to explore, there are a total of 20 on-chain DEX data endpoints.

Hello Soon Aik Chiew

Great insights so far!

Let’s talk Data. How does CoinGecko ensure the accuracy and reliability of its data? Could you walk us through the methodology used to aggregate and verify this data?

Re: Ensuring data accuracy and reliability
CoinGecko aggregates cryptocurrency price, volume and liquidity data across multiple tickers from 1,000+ exchanges globally, and calculates the market price of each cryptocurrency through our comprehensive algorithm. Our methodology is published on our website and if you’re interested in diving deeper, here’s our in-depth price aggregation methodology.

A call-out from my end: We’ve integrated more than 1,000 exchanges, which is the largest number in the industry, to ensure that we provide the most accurate global average prices.

Thanks for that Soon Aik Chiew!

With the proliferation of new cryptocurrencies and tokens, how does CoinGecko decide which ones to include in its platform for tracking?

Asher Umerie To be listed on CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency must first be tradable on an exchange tracked by CoinGecko. We have a stringent listing criteria and verification process, where our operations team thoroughly reviews data points like website and team information, social media profiles with a minimum following, and have a working block explorer so that our users are able to verify transactions and monitor network activity.

If crypto assets are traded on a decentralized exchange (DEX) supported by GeckoTerminal, they’ll be automatically listed on GeckoTerminal. Users can find the tokens by searching their contract address in the search bar.

What does this mean with respect to our API? – Through our new on-chain DEX data endpoints powered by GeckoTerminal and accessible via CoinGecko API, users can get data for cryptocurrencies not listed on CoinGecko. This means extensive coverage and access to 2.6M tokens and 2.9M crypto liquidity pools (factually accurate as of this AMA).

Soon Aik Chiew That's so cool! How can developers leverage the CoinGecko API to enhance the functionality of their crypto projects beyond market tracking and portfolio management? Any exciting features people should know about?

Re: exciting features!
Sure thing, we have some interesting endpoints & use cases here:

1. /search/trending - to get coins, NFTs, and categories that are now trending on coingecko.com, based on user searches.

1 thing that developers particularly enjoy is our API's capability to look up a coin's data with a contract address, which reduces the effort & time required for API ID mapping.
On our developer dashboard, we also provide some useful features to enhance developer experience, such as:

Hey folks! Glad to have you here and really excited to learn more about the CoinGecko API. To start things off, what's a feature in the CoinGecko API that you wish more users knew about?

Hey Sheharyar Khan. Thanks for asking.
If I were to suggest only 1 feature, it would be the on-chain DEX API data that Julia also shared above, which is the latest addition of API endpoints.

Historically, CoinGecko (and our API) has focused primarily on providing aggregated price and market data, which is what most of our users know us for. Many people may still not be aware that we also offer NFT and DEX data through our website, app, and API. We hope that more people will discover them and benefit from it!

Hey everyone, thanks for joining us! What do you feel are CoinGecko’s strongest features and differentiators that make it stand out from similar crypto data platforms?

Hi, thanks for asking about what differentiates us from other similar platforms. If I were to summarise, it would be the depth and breadth of data we provide (as shared above), coupled with a dedicated 24x7 support team that ensures the accuracy and reliability of the data. The crypto market never sleeps, we have to constantly innovate with technological and operational excellence to keep up.

Soon Aik Chiew & Julia Ng that answers how you ensure data reliability. I'm curious about your future roadmap. Are there any upcoming features or improvements that users and developers can look forward to?

Hey Monica,
Of course, API users always demand faster, better data, as well as a superior developer experience.

Improving data quality and service performance has been an ongoing effort for our teams. We're looking forward to taking it to the next level by offering more real-time data, and new endpoints to unlock new use cases for our users.

On the developer experience front, we are exploring ways to make our API more user-friendly, such as by providing SDK libraries and offering more data delivery options.

Thanks Soon! As a follow-up to Julia Ng’s earlier comment on CoinGecko's use cases; who would you say is the ideal persona/user profile for using the CoinGecko API overall? Would users in certain professions (investment, research, finance, etc.) benefit more from the API?

Sheharyar Khan, I’ll chime in! Our ideal persona is definitely Enterprises that require our highest-tiered custom plans 😉 But seriously – the ideal persona would be key stakeholders (like founders, product managers, senior developers) in firms that need crypto price and market data, be it to build a feature or power their core offering. Users in certain professions as you’ve mentioned, investment, research, and finance, would also definitely benefit, especially if they are looking to research about cryptocurrencies, market trends or backtest trading strategies.

How would you say that CoinGecko adapts or plans to adapt its marketing to respond to the occasionally volatile crypto market? What do bearish times for crypto look like at CoinGecko?

Regardless of the market sentiment, there will still be crypto projects building in the space. Bearish times only mean that there is less activity in the market, but this allows us to hunker down, focus on improving our product, whilst continuing to communicate those improvements to projects and users that would find our API useful. These would take the form of guides, video resources, newsletters, and so on.

On that note, we’d love to hear from the Hackernoon community – what kind of content around our API would pique your interest?

Hey everyone! What’s the hardest part of doing marketing for a crypto product/website?

Hey Jose Hernandez, in my opinion, generating demand outside of the existing crypto market, simply because our product is considerably niche. If users aren’t looking to integrate a crypto price data API, there’s not much we can do, except to continue increasing awareness and educating about our offering, so that when they do – we are top of mind.

Soon Aik Chiew I imagine it's a constant call for new features. This brings me to the writing contest CoinGecko is hosting on HackerNoon. What are your hopes for this contest? What kind of submissions are you looking for? Julia Ng

Mónica Freitas We’d love to see submissions that explore how our crypto data API empowers developers, traders, and crypto projects to innovate. It could be drilling down into a specific use case or ideating on a potential use case that may not technically exist today, like in the intersection of AI+ML.

Beyond that, we’d also encourage submissions that deep dive into the coverage and depth of crypto asset data, metadata, historical data, and how it can be used for research, analytics, trading strategies, and more. Bonus points if it is specific to CoinGecko API!

Great responses so far Julia Ng!

AI is undeniably the rave of the moment. Over the last few years, it would seem as though innovation = AI integration. On the topic of AI/ML intersecting with your crypto data API, what are some potential use cases that you find promising?

Asher Umerie Well, some promising use cases would be conducting analyses or https://www.coingecko.com/learn/bitcoin-price-prediction-machine-learning using machine learning algorithms (think neural networks, sentiment analysis), financial programming (i.e. using historical and live price data to design algorithmic trading strategies, build sniper bots), and so on. AI crypto bots is another segment of potential use cases– there are https://www.coingecko.com/learn/ai-crypto-chatbot that surface the right data based on user inputs, price alert bots, trading bots, Telegram bots (eg. https://twitter.com/coingecko/status/1715035138135068901), just to name a few.

To elaborate, for instance, you can conduct a sentiment analysis using machine learning algorithms. Users can tap into the website and social media metadata of cryptocurrencies, available via CoinGecko API, and process that information in a machine learning model, to identify whether a project’s social media community is growing or stagnating, or how to spot trends based on how many users have watchlisted or upvoted a coin or token. Another example is to employ algorithms that analyze metadata obtained from our API, to ascertain the legitimacy of websites or flag if sites are suspicious or malicious.

For price predictions, it could be as simple as developing a price prediction model using historical price data for one or a few cryptocurrencies, or something more complex based on trading volume and liquidity pool activity.

Truly exciting stuff Julia Ng!
I appreciate the fact that the CoinGecko blog covers these potential applications concisely. Your team is doing some important work.

Soon Aik Chiew this one’s for you! For developers who are new to using CoinGecko API, what resources or support do you provide to help them get started quickly and effectively? Are there any best practices or tips you would recommend for maximizing the value of your API?

Hi Asher Umerie, for developers who are new to CoinGecko API, whether you're a beginner or a pro like Satoshi, fret not, we've got you covered,

The team has put up a lot of useful resources, but not limited to the following:

Thank you Soon Aik Chiew!

Let's turn Monica's previous question around. What types of submissions would you deem unsuitable for this contest?

Asher Umerie Given that CoinGecko API supplies aggregated crypto price and market data, we’d definitely prefer that submissions focus on or includes crypto data APIs (like ours), instead of wholly anchoring on ‘crypto API’, as in APIs from crypto exchanges (eg. Binance API) or Bitcoin API.

It’s entirely acceptable if submissions contain a mix of the different types of APIs, like in a comparison piece, as long as it includes our API offering.

Great topics Julia Ng
What advice would you give to writers? Any resources you would share? Especially if they write about CoinGecko API

Mónica Freitas Do check out our API and API documentation pages! Everything from an overview of our endpoints to how each endpoint is used on CoinGecko.com and GeckoTerminal.com and use cases are there.

If you need more inspiration, we’ve provided a list of writing prompts on our contest page, to get the juices flowing! Wishing all the writers the best of luck :)

That’s a wrap for this AMA!

Thank you Julia Ng and Soon Aik Chiew for your time, thoughtful answers and attention to detail. We’re excited to follow your journey from here on out and see what you do next!

To all the writers on HackerNoon, make sure to leverage the valuable insights shared during this conversation when crafting your entries for the #crypto-api writing contest.

We can’t wait to read what you come up with!