CoinMarketCap CEO Departs Today

From Carylyne Chan

Dear CoinMarketCap community,

I am writing to tell you that I am leaving CoinMarketCap today. However, I’m not leaving with a heavy heart, but rather optimism as I focus on other entrepreneurial endeavors. I’d also like to take the opportunity to reminisce about what the CoinMarketCap team has collectively done in the past few years since I’ve been here.

Fulfilling our promise and building our team values

When I first started working with Brandon Chez, the founder of CoinMarketCap — this was in January 2018 — I told Brandon that there is so much unfulfilled promise that CoinMarketCap needs to realize. There were many possibilities and opportunities for us to grasp, from the business model and geographical reach, to brand and product.

One of my first orders of business when I came to CoinMarketCap was to establish its brand and tell people what we stood for. Do you remember that CoinMarketCap didn’t have a logo until May 2018? (Lol.) But as we know, a brand goes far beyond a logo to what the team stands for and what we believe in, and how we would present that to the world. For me, CoinMarketCap had to stand for these values: integrity, transparency, non-censorship and accountability. And this applied to every part of our business, from the data to our team. In the past two and a half years I’ve been at CoinMarketCap, I believe that we have successfully embedded these values across our brand, product, team and to our community.

Insisting on fundamentally sound solutions

Since the first time I directly addressed the volume inflation issue, I have been working tirelessly with our team to develop a fundamental solution for this that would not lead to us censoring data or providing an arbitrary ranking based on our own preferences, much like other solutions do. We wanted a way to solve this so that it was statistically sound, provable and technically robust. Quality and doing things right was a big part of the CoinMarketCap DNA too. This solution ended up taking a long time, but we first developed the Liquidity metric and score last year, then our new Confidence indicator and rankings this year. A large part of the solution was contributed by our acquisition of Hashtag Capital, whom we welcomed to our team in June 2019.

To further cement our commitment to data transparency, we also founded the Data Accountability & Transparency Alliance (DATA) and are actively building self-reporting mechanisms for the CoinMarketCap site. This is to ensure that we follow through on the promises we’ve collectively made as an alliance to further data transparency and accountability for the crypto space.

Making crypto more accessible

Beyond this, I’ve also made it a mission to share crypto with those outside of our core community, so that we can make crypto, as an industry, and as an asset class more discoverable. I worked on making sure that our crypto data was available to Vela, which serves hundreds of trading venues, and made sure that our crypto indices were launched on Nasdaq, Bloomberg, and Refinitiv (Thomson Reuters). We also brought our crypto data to Yahoo! Finance, powering their crypto screener and indices, too. I even took the time to write our very basic Intro to Crypto guide and Glossary on CoinMarketCap!

Throughout my time here, I have worked very closely with our product and growth team to launch many new products and features that enhanced the site, based on our users’ requests. We’ve launched our well-loved newsletter, a professional API, block explorers, mobile apps, Interest, derivatives, ratings, our conference The Capital, and most recently, DeFi, Chat and Alexandria. We also had a lot of fun together, like on our infamous Toilet Paper Token!

Setting the stage for the next phase of growth

I have personally hired and trained more than a quarter of our close-to-50-person team right now, and I am proud to say that each person on the CoinMarketCap team that I’ve worked with has been passionate, humble and eager to learn. They embody the spirit of transparency and integrity that I mentioned above and will continue to carry the torch for what we’ve built at CoinMarketCap together in the last two plus years.

As I’ve laid out my strategy and plans for CoinMarketCap over the course of the next few quarters, you should see many new assets being listed, and much more content and educational material added to the site. These will all ensure that not only do we cater to you, as our core community, but also those who are crypto-curious and just finding out what the crypto space is all about. You can expect thousands of pages of educational content being added to the site, refreshed designs and deeper interactivity across the site and apps.

Thank you

To repeat what I’ve summarized in my Q2 letter to you, being at CoinMarketCap has been a long but fruitful journey for me as well. I’ve learned just how important it is to have principles that you stick to, and how to lead with grace even when things get tough. I will continue to write more about my experiences and what I’ve learnt on my own time (even possibly writing a book about CoinMarketCap with Brandon Chez himself!) so keep an eye out for my byline in the future.

It is my wish that CoinMarketCap will continue to uphold its core values of transparency, integrity, non-censorship and accountability that I have helped build in the last two and a half years that I’ve been at this great company.

In the meantime, I will also be writing more here on my blog. If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts, feel free to find me on LinkedIn or Twitter anytime!

Sincerely,
Carylyne Chan
Departing CEO/Chief Strategy Officer
CoinMarketCap, Jan. 2018 – Aug. 2020