CoinMarketCap
Global crypto market data aggregator and price tracker
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Atlas
A decentralized oracle offering customizable, secure data feeds
CoinGlass
Crypto derivatives data & liquidation analysis platform
Hashtag Capital
Hashtag Capital is a professional crypto asset quantitative trading and strategic investment team. The partners of the team have many years of trading experience, technical accumulation and industry contacts.
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About CoinMarketCap
CoinMarketCap (CMC) is a cryptocurrency data platform founded in 2013, serving as a one-stop hub for real-time prices, market capitalizations, trading volumes, and historical charts for over 13 million crypto assets. Its core business covers price tracking, market rankings, on-chain data (DexScan), and a professional API used by exchanges, media, and financial institutions. The platform's key strength lies in its data comprehensiveness and neutrality: it aggregates information from thousands of exchanges, applies standardized methodologies (e.g., market cap = price × circulating supply), and is widely cited by mainstream outlets like Forbes and Bloomberg. CMC addresses the market pain point of fragmented and opaque crypto information by providing a single, reliable source for comparing assets, tracking narratives, and verifying performance — helping users cut through noise and make informed decisions. In the past six months (March–September 2026), CMC launched CMC AI endpoints in its Pro API (September 2026), offering structured AI-generated insights such as market sentiment, price-movement explanations, and roadmap summaries with source attribution, initially for enterprise users. In November 2025, it introduced new trading tools to track narratives and validate performance metrics like liquidity pools. The platform also expanded tracking to over 13 million cryptocurrencies and maintained monthly page views exceeding 1 billion. No major negative events were reported in the past two years.
CoinMarketCap was founded in May 2013 by developer Brandon Chez in Long Island City, Queens, initially as a solo project. The platform gained mainstream recognition in 2018 when The Wall Street Journal profiled its founder, and later that year it removed South Korean exchanges from its price algorithm due to extreme price discrepancies, a decision that caused significant market volatility.
In March 2019, CoinMarketCap launched two major indices—the CMC Crypto 200 Index and the CMC Crypto 200 ex BTC Index—calculated by German index provider Solactive AG. These indices were listed on Nasdaq, Bloomberg Terminal, and Refinitiv, marking a significant step toward institutional adoption.
In April 2020, Binance acquired CoinMarketCap for an estimated $400 million, though the figure was never officially confirmed. The platform continued to operate independently. In 2021, it became an API partner with Coinbase, expanding its data services.
In June 2025, CoinMarketCap suffered a security breach where hackers exploited a vulnerability in its front-end system using a doodle image to inject malicious code, triggering fake wallet verification pop-ups. The team removed the pop-up and implemented mitigation measures. Earlier that year, the platform had also dealt with a separate account theft incident and a phishing scam impersonating customer service.
A notable product milestone was the launch of the decentralized finance index token CMC20, which tracks the performance of the DeFi sector and represents a significant expansion beyond simple price tracking.
Over the past six months, CoinMarketCap's major progress centered on data APIs and AI access. In Aug-Sep 2026, it launched AI-oriented CMC AI endpoints (/v5/cmc-ai), exposing homepage and coin-page AI Q&A, trending questions, and news as structured JSON, covering top-100 assets by market cap and refreshing every 30 minutes. The family first opened to Enterprise plans, with a separate monthly AI credit allowance later extending it to all plans.
At the same time, the Pro API added real-world asset (RWA) endpoints, initially listing 7,937 tokenized traditional assets including equities, commodities, currencies, government securities, ETFs, and real estate, with ID map, metadata, and issuer endpoints. Market-data endpoints followed, and historical time-series is planned.
The AI Agent Hub also went live, offering an MCP server, x402 keyless pay-per-call access, CMC CLI, IDE integrations, and pre-built agent Skills. x402 charges $0.01 USDC per request on Base with no API key.
Official future priorities: RWA market-data endpoints (asset list, aggregate quotes, market pairs, convert), historical time series; AI endpoints for all plans; MCP expansion to multi-market DEX trading and on-chain data on Ethereum/Solana/BNB Chain. Separately, CoinMarketCap stated that a malicious actor scraped public profile fields via user-ID enumeration; it has enhanced WAF rules, rate limits, and API hardening.
Aaron, co-founder and CTO, is responsible for technology development and platform architecture.
Rush Lu, CEO, graduated from Stanford University and Chengdu University of Technology. He held technical management positions at IBM, Trip.com, Amazon, and later founded Haowu App. He has served as CEO of CoinMarketCap since October 2021.