Welcome to Building on Blockchain pt. 3!
Part 3 ft. CoinMarketCal — Building on Blockchain is an interview series; find details on this series or start from the beginning here: [ link ].
We are very proud to present the third part in our interview series with Anthony Ribeiro, CEO of CoinMarketCal.
CoinMarketCal aims to provide accurate and evidence-based news and events for the cryptocurrency industry. All events on CoinMarketCal are sourced and mostly gathered by the community. This is CoinMarketCal’s story, mission and our interview with Anthony Ribeiro, Founder & CEO. Thanks again Anthony.
Anthony Ribeiro founded CoinMarketCal in October 2017, with goals of creating a community-driven tool that would benefit the community behind it. The calendar allows its users to submit sourced, evidence-based news and events; while allowing them to validate news and events submitted by other users.
In just 16 months, CoinMarketCal has created an accurate, community-driven, economic calendar for the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. CoinMarketCal is the most popular crypto calendar by many measures, with thousands of events submitted every month and over 400 verified teams managing their own news and events.
Thanks to CoinMarketCal, staying up-to-date with news and events has never been easier. This is how CoinMarketCal is Building on Blockchain.
ELC wanted CoinMarketCal for Building on Blockchain because of their story, mission, & growth.
CoinMarketCal operates on the front lines of the industry. The community keeps real, valuable, sourced news and events in one place. Because of this, CoinMarketCal was a top choice for the Building on Blockchain series.
The idea behind CoinMarketCal came to founder Anthony Ribeiro, in Sept. 2017. Realizing how much time he and his friends were spending on research. Researching the teams behind cryptocurrencies, keeping track of the events like community meet-ups, hard-forks, re-brands etc.. Anthony began to build a solution. Creating CoinMarketCal.com in 7 days of day-and-night work, officially launching on October 2nd, 2017.
Since their launch- the website has averaged 2.8 million views a month, CoinMarketCal’s team grew to 7 people, they’ve started a bi-weekly newsletter, launched an API, launched a customizable widget and a bot- which automatically sends relevant news to its users. Not only that- they’ve released tons of features (including a more efficient search area and a night mode), had 3 give-away’s on twitter, and the website has been translated into 8 languages.
Today, the CoinMarketCal website is in the top 60,000 websites globally, the API is used by hundreds of apps and websites, and the users are all over the world. About 50% of which are from the following countries combined: South Korea, India, United States, Turkey & Russia; being the most popular in South Korea.
The website itself, is incredibly useful and reliable for someone looking for news and events related to the cryptocurrency/blockchain industry. There are features and filters for everything. Look through past events, search by date, event type, search by coin; or use a search filter to show only coin, just the top 10 or top 100 coins- even exclude some coins from being shown. You can also set reminders and save your search preferences. There are so many features in fact, we can’t list them all here.
The founder of CoinMarketCal puts it this way:
“CoinMarketCal is a tool, not the answer.” — Anthony Ribeiro
The websites’ users are responsible for submitting the events, with proof and a source. Through their actions, the users create a community consensus for each event- voting ‘real’ or ‘fake’. This shifts responsibility to the users to verify real events that are submitted to the website.
Here’s how the process works:
This process allows users to participate and vote on relevant news and events. The users can be developers, journalists, traders, miners, enthusiasts or anyone else looking to stay up-to-date. This process has created the leading and most reliable information hub in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. This makes CoinMarketCal a very valuable tool today.
At present- there is a cry for integrity in reporting and news. It is comforting to know that practical solutions do exist; and it’s incredibly exciting to see where this could take us.
We spoke with the CoinMarketCal Founder & CEO, Anthony Ribeiro.
Anthony is a diligent leader, with a natural ability to identify problems and create solutions. As a CEO, Anthony is a perfect reflection of the blockchain industry, as the industry itself was created as an alternate solution to today’s problems.
Below is our Q & A:
ELC: When the idea for CoinMarketCal came to you, was it instantaneous? Or did the idea for CoinMarketCal take some time to develop?
Anthony Ribeiro: “There was definitely a ‘WOW!’ moment, back in Sept. 2017, I realized how much time my friends and I spent researching. At that time if you were interested in cryptocurrency there was no short-hand way to research. You would have to go through: Bitcointalk, Slack, Twitter, Telegram & more; if you wanted to keep up with dates, it was virtually impossible with more than 1000 coins. I realized we needed a new tool, and I was surprised that none existed. That’s the basis of our project.”
ELC: How would you explain the significance of projects that are evidence-based and community driven?
Anthony Ribeiro: “Community-driven was a given to build a long term, long standing project. It couldn’t be done otherwise. It is impossible for a single person or even a small team, to maintain a database with information on all of these projects. It is also economically uninteresting.
As far as CoinMarketCal being evidence-based, I think it was needed too; especially because people rely on us to stay informed. Not only that, but in an era of fake news, evidence-based news is more than welcome. We need to provide our community with the tools to research and verify the information we provide. Don’t trust. Verify. That is really important.
Since Oct. 2nd, there has been no events on CoinMarketCal without proof or source; and there never will be. Because of the nature of the cryptocurrency markets at that time, there was a lot of scammy things going on, and we do not want to represent fake news at all.”
ELC: You’re in a very delicate position, dealing with news. Your image and integrity sit on a thin line. How do you treat this?
Anthony Ribeiro: “Exactly, your image can be destroyed in a second. But we (and I mean we, because we are a team) built this with long-term goals in mind. Even though I didn’t know about the success we would have, I wanted to build a sustainable product for me, my friends, and the crypto community; and that still rings true right now.”
ELC: What is an average day of work like for the CoinMarketCal CEO?
Anthony Ribeiro: “ I wake up and check my emails. I answer to every single request we receive, it’s very important for a community-driven project. My
priority is to answer to our coin representatives’ requests because they submit almost 50% of all the events. Then, I usually work on the upcoming updates with Jérôme Chesne, CoinMarketCal’s CTO. The website is always improving, we listen to our users a lot. This is typically what I do but every day is filled in with other things like calls, managing advertisements and marketing which is all very important as well. I will talk to the same 7-10 people every day, and usually answer between 25-30 emails daily.”
Thank You to Anthony and CoinMarketCal for giving us the pleasure of an interview, and providing a practical solution to a major problem. We are supporting your mission and will be following closely!
Did you enjoy Building on Blockchain pt. 3?
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