6 weeks after buying Coinmarketcap Binance is now number 1

In case you didn't hear, Binance bought Coinmarketcap a month ago for $400 million. A lot of people were wondering why would Binance pay such a high price for a statistics website. Well, we now have the answer.

The data aggregator yesterday changed its methodology to rank exchanges on their web traffic by default instead of "liquidity metric,” which was only introduced in November and was until now the default ranking method.

Coincidentally, Binance ranks number 1 with these new rankings. It achieved a perfect web score of 1,000 which means CoinMarketCap believes 100% activity on Binance is human. The two main rivals Coinbase Pro and Kraken achieved a web score factor of 972 and 856.

Yes, I know.

CoinMarketCap was previously against the idea of using web traffic as a factor for ranking. The CEO of the company had said last year (when it was still independent), that web traffic was “not a good indicator” as many traders use API keys, which obfuscate the data being collected.

CZ said on Twitter: "we listened" like it was something that users asked. And BTW, what does it mean "we"? He also said that the rankings are useful again, although not 100% accurate.

Anyway, for the moment I suggest you use Coingecko. It's independent, at least for now.

Image credit: Binance and Coinmarketcap