On September 25, CoinMarketCap completed its acquisition of the crypto derivatives data platform Coinglass. The deal amount was not disclosed. Coinglass was founded in 2019 and tracks open interest, funding rates, liquidations, long/short ratios, and options and ETF flows across 28 exchanges and more than 2,500 instruments. It has more than 5 million monthly active users, and over 10,000 API clients. Its liquidation heatmap and funding rate tables are key tools for many people to judge “where leverage is piling up and where liquidations will land.” CoinMarketCap’s monthly active user base is about 115 million.
In terms of deal structure, Coinglass keeps its brand and team and continues to operate independently. Its website, app, free tools, APIs, and pricing remain unchanged. Its CEO’s exact words are: “Coinglass is still Coinglass—nothing changes for users.” The change lies in the direction of integration: CMC will bring derivatives data into its own platform, so that people who look at spot price quotes can also see their positions and liquidation distributions. CMC’s Chief Product Officer says that derivatives are “where risk is truly being taken.”
My take: this is vertical integration at the data layer. Adding derivatives data to a spot dashboard effectively turns “where risk is” into an entry point—commercially, it’s very smooth. But it also means that indicators like the liquidation heatmap and funding rates, which are widely used by retail traders as signals, will become increasingly concentrated in a single group’s hands. Once a single data source distorts quotes or changes its definitions, the amplification effect is not linear, because both the algorithms and people have long been accustomed to treating it as the benchmark.
Next, there are two things to watch: whether the pricing and definitions for the integrated APIs will change (currently promised not to), and whether true multi-source, open alternatives will emerge. The real downside of data centralization has never been that it’s expensive—it’s that you don’t have anything to compare against.
Before you place an order, do you check the liquidation heatmap? If in the future only one provider offers this kind of data, would you switch indicators?
#CoinMarketCap完成收购Coinglass
In terms of deal structure, Coinglass keeps its brand and team and continues to operate independently. Its website, app, free tools, APIs, and pricing remain unchanged. Its CEO’s exact words are: “Coinglass is still Coinglass—nothing changes for users.” The change lies in the direction of integration: CMC will bring derivatives data into its own platform, so that people who look at spot price quotes can also see their positions and liquidation distributions. CMC’s Chief Product Officer says that derivatives are “where risk is truly being taken.”
My take: this is vertical integration at the data layer. Adding derivatives data to a spot dashboard effectively turns “where risk is” into an entry point—commercially, it’s very smooth. But it also means that indicators like the liquidation heatmap and funding rates, which are widely used by retail traders as signals, will become increasingly concentrated in a single group’s hands. Once a single data source distorts quotes or changes its definitions, the amplification effect is not linear, because both the algorithms and people have long been accustomed to treating it as the benchmark.
Next, there are two things to watch: whether the pricing and definitions for the integrated APIs will change (currently promised not to), and whether true multi-source, open alternatives will emerge. The real downside of data centralization has never been that it’s expensive—it’s that you don’t have anything to compare against.
Before you place an order, do you check the liquidation heatmap? If in the future only one provider offers this kind of data, would you switch indicators?
#CoinMarketCap完成收购Coinglass