Price tracking website CoinMarketCap announced on Wednesday a new professional API which will make it more compatible with business use. There are also a number of new features, according to its official blog.
Big News Day: Our pro API is now live! And you may notice a brand new CMC site with exchanges on the front page, derivatives, events, glossary and a newsletter! ?? Read all about it on our blog: https://t.co/T68MHv6jxM
— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) August 1, 2018
New interface and new features
API stands for application programming interface. It is a set of internal protocols which define how easy an operating system is to programme. CoinMarketCap is realising a professional API which will allow other companies to integrate its price data into their systems.
It is also adding data on derivatives markets to its feed. Derivatives are financial contracts which are themselves worth money and tradeable. Cryptocurrency-based derivatives were first seen late last year and have since become more popular.
Additional data relating to cryptocurrency exchanges will also be displayed. Their volumes can now be review by date, and specific types of exchange can be searched for with new search filters.
In addition to these things, CoinMarketCap will be publishing a daily newspaper which "can be read in five minutes or less." It says that this feature was "highly requested". It has also added an events page and a glossary of cryptocurrency terms
Keeping track
CoinMarketCap tracks the prices and market capitalisations of 1,722 Cryptocurrencies , and the trading volumes (reported and adjusted) of 209 cryptocurrency exchanges.
It calculates the price of a given cryptocurrency by taking an average of data reported by the exchanges that deal in that cryptocurrency - for example, Bitcoin 's price is taken from 400 markets, and NEO's from 111. The website then calculates the market capitalisation of that cryptocurrency by multiplying the price by the token's circulating supply.
It differentiates between coins and tokens by defining the latter as a cryptocurrency that depends on another cryptocurrency to operate; for example, Binance Coin is based on Ethereum and is thus a token, while Bitcoin is independent and is thus a coin.
The history of CoinMarketCap
The website is just over five years old. It celebrated its fifth birthday in May by releasing a mobile application and redesigning its logo.
In January 2017 the website nearly caused the market to crash when it arbitrarily removed all South Korean exchanges from its listings. This led to a massive selloff as people misinterpreted the new price data as a crash.
The accuracy of the information displayed on the website has been questioned in the past because the data of the cryptocurrency exchanges from which it takes its information is also subject to some doubt. One man even created a website called 'Honest CoinMarketCap' to highlight that the original's information is inaccurate. The new website displayed prices and trade volumes which were considerably lower than those on the original, but the demonstration was a little flawed because the honest version failed to report where it took its information from.
In July 2018 the website removed the lower limit of $50,000 daily trading volume that exchanges previously had to see in order to appear on the page. It made this move as a response to claims that this was unfair.
