Tokenizing the World with CoinGecko Co-Founder Bobby Ong

Transcript

foreign welcome back to the roll up today we have a very special guest the co-founder of coing gecko Bobby UNG it is absolutely a pleasure to be talking to you Bobby I'm happy that you're able to join the channel we were able to figure out these time zones and uh I'm really looking forward to hear about uh coing Gecko and and the newest latest product coming out of coin gecko gecko terminal um so without further Ado please introduce yourself and uh yeah tell us how you got started and then we'll take a look at Gecko terminal sounds good thank you very much I'm very excited to be on this show today so yeah my name is

Bobby I'm the co-founder and CEO at coin gecko uh literally myself I've got a background in economics I learn about Bitcoin and kind of bought my first Bitcoin in 2013 and I want to kind of believe that this may be the future of money and wants to kind of be in this industry so in 2014 my co-founder TM Li and I decided to build a site project and over the years hustle away into building into one uh the largest independent crypto data aggregator and and um yeah I think over the years we've kind of built um Point gecko you guys know what we do um we have a website an app a coin gecko API and the newest product that we have

is gecko terminal so so yeah excited to be chatting here today I think there's a lot of things that we'll be talking today yeah most definitely and and before we get into gecko terminal uh can you tell us kind of how like Gekko uh you know was able to insert itself as one of the leading data providers in crypto yeah I think is more about understanding what is needed in the space what is missing and how to get those data so when we when I when I first got started in crypto to get my partner there weren't that many places with um with good information on on crypto data so we were out there trying to scratch our own age and try to build

some information site that we could kind of use for ourselves something that we are proud to look at um I mean it was kind of hard to believe but in 2014 websites in crypto were so badly designed that they reminded us of websites from the mid 90s and uh here we are with some skills in building websites and we thought hey we could do a better job at this so we thought we could do but all the years I think the crypto space has sort of change very significantly uh from what used to be only Bitcoin trading to maybe a few altcoin tradings and now we have thousands of cryptocurrencies initially traded on centralized exchanges and then I think in the year 2020 kind of the scene changed again with rise of D5

um that really required and um a re-engineering of the coin gecko platform because uh coin gecko was built to track prices from centralized exchanges so we were used to expecting an API response from a centralized exchange but when uni stop came about like it kind of decentralized trading and enabled anybody to kind of create a liquidity pool and kind of allow so many tokens to be traded uh there was no API response from Unison up like we talked to the team and responders just get the data from the blockchain it's very simple to say that but it was very simple for us to do so the requirement for us was to kind of do the r d the necessary research to see how we can support it and I think we were the first

to be able to track uni swap prices and with that uh we'll be able to track all the long tail of tokens that were getting hot because of the D5 summer on uniswab this is Then followed by tokens traded on balancer curve and so on I took a few months for our competitors to catch up but um I think that was kind of how we instead ourselves more significantly in the D5 ecosystem um we started seeing a a shift in Trent again um and what we saw was that no matter how fast we add things on coin gecko we see there is still the long long long tail of tokens that are

probably not listed on coin gecko so for example coin Jacob takes a curated approach to token listings on the website so we cannot have somebody uh going around checking the contract making sure that there's no sort of really obvious malicious intent in the contract before listing them um therefore we only have about 11 000 tokens listed on coin gecko because somebody has to check it on gecko terminal we basically for example read and track every single token that is traded on a blockchain and what this means is that anything that is traded on a decks even though if it's a one dollar trading volume it will show up on on on gecko terminal so with that we have over 1.2 million tokens tracked on gecko

terminal and then kind of the reason why we built this is because we when we started crypto we started building coin gecko back in 2014 we have this Vision that anything that can be tokenized will be tokenized so we kind of move forward to that future where there will be every everything is tokenized there will be Millions No in fact billions of tokens out there in the world and everyone's going to be really confused trying to make sense of this world there needs to be a place where somebody could come to a website or to the app and try to make sense of all the tokens out there and we that's that's kind of aim of finally we want to be the place where people try to make sense of this crazy token world and and gecko terminal is one step in fulfilling this vision of like tracking

all tokens that that will be traded in the future yeah and it comes from a place where you said you were mostly on centralized exchanges and that that was kind of born as like the first trade where you saw a lot of these a lot of these uh people who made you know a lot of money in crypto were arbitraging between Korean exchanges and American exchanges or Japanese exchanges and arbitraging the price and now we have a similar uh a similar kind of plethora of opportunities in a blossom of tokens that are now uh kind of launching on whole you know many many chains many many networks so many tokens that it's creating a lot of Arbitrage opportunities across different exchanges

as well as different protocols um and as far as the the listing on coing gecko it makes you know perfect sense it almost adds a label of legitimacy to any tokens that are listed on coin Gecko and it doesn't give the entire picture of tokenization in in this D5 world and it sounds like now you guys are Bridging the Gap from 11 000 tokens that is a small uh subset of the tokenized world on coin gecko you guys are now blossoming to incorporate all of the tokens that are in this tokenized world through gecko terminal um and I think you know now's a perfect time to kind of showcase the platform um and show our audience what what gecko

terminal is all about all right sounds good let me share my screen and it'd be interesting to share what we have built do you see it right now uh yeah yeah there it is all right so yeah here's a screen share of gecko Terminator I do some screenshot and share what we've built so far so I think there's a few different things uh on gecko to me I think I want to bring some highlights to the top stats bar over here so we've done like the integration with cryptofia and grid index so at this point in time fourth of April Market seems to be in a greedy mode uh it seems to be up only for the past a couple of months um we have the gas price over here uh I

think what surprise me the most I was was how quickly like the growth of L1 l2s that has taken place in the past one year when we started gecko terminal first version of gecko terminal was actually an API that tracks binance smart chain that we use internally to power the prices of pancake Shop tokens on coin gecko but that was over a year ago and in that period of time in just one year like we now track over 91 different chains and you can see the list of chains over here so you can see new change like ZK sync polygon ZK evm which has this uh Stars always here that kind of highlights some of the new chains and then we sought them by volume so it's

about ethereum arbitrum these are the chains with the most volume BNB chain optimism polygon Avalanche candle Phantom Clayton so these are names that you are familiar with they're all evm over here we have some non-evm chains like apptos over here I think we have Solana over here over here you can see that as well but just scroll down and you'll be surprised at how many non-evm I mean how many layer 1 chains out there that are kind of building look at all these names yeah so many and that is one surprise to me modularity exactly yeah exactly exactly we want to find out

by bringing in all the data exactly exactly yeah and every single one of this chain there's all these dexes so we track over close to 500 dexes right now with 1.4 million liquidity pools with over a million tokens so gecko terminal has 100x more tokens track compared to coin Gecko and as I mentioned like anything that can be tokenized will be tokenized they will be we used to think there were millions of tokens but I think we've kind of reached that stage right now so I I would change it to there will be billions of tokens out there so there will be an auto magnitude more than this in the next few years and so yeah uh kind of this is the overview you have

the most view pools top gainers top losers this is for the entire thing we can kind of zero in on ethereum and you can kind of see the list of all the taxes over here so we have unisot V3 curve Unity tool balancer Sushi Swap and look at this there's so many many taxes on on ethereum uh so yeah these are some of the the the interesting stats you can see the volume and um what should we look at today which token yeah what what's been catching your eye Floki I don't know nothing not I guess avitram right arbitrum's been pretty interesting lately right uh a lot everyone's talking about

uh the foundations uh doing some weird stuff with their governance so this is arbitrum um so yeah I think the interesting part is you can kind of see kind of the price movements in the last five minutes 24 hours number of transactions buys sales you have a calculator here under arbitrome is 100 USD or 116 usdc after usdc d-pad we can't really assume usdc equals one dollars anymore because that can happen again anytime um because some I think this is pretty popular I think people want to copy the token and then kind of go and trade by yourself or click to add to metamask or to V1 RB scan for example kind of did

this integration with go plus uh token security to kind of check if it's a Honeypot if there's any buy or sell text especially for like DJ and Traders who want to trade uh ultimate coins for example um yeah there's some ultimate in main decks and a bunch of different stats over here if you want to trade you can kind of click on this it should go to I think this would be uni swap with the currency in place already um favorite features from from uh coin gecko in general is the ability to go and like see the most liquid markets and then click on the market and it'll take

me right there on the most the most liquid Market where I can trade the token and and the ability to copy and paste the smart contract address has saved me so much time because I can paste it right into my metamask I can add it to my wallet and then to send the token from there so the like the token address and then seeing all of the the markets in terms of liquidity has saved so much time when I'm trading some coin and I can't find where the liquidity is and I I want to you know I want to get it or I want to dump it and I have to go to coin Gecko and and find where the liquidity is uh by looking at the Marcus and you know I I think the uh the honey pot and some of these other scanners are going to be a big help too

like even if something is a rug you know you guys can put like hey you know beware this contract this is a rug in addition to some of the other you know uh like other parameters and other features that you put inside of the token page yeah I think that's one of the biggest worry for us when it comes to gecko terminal because it tracks every token like like it's very easy like it that definitely includes a lot of spam and scam tokens and uh there's no indicator for us and I think we have to rely on some of these automated token trackers uh token security trackers to kind of give some stats on how um whether the token is kind of good or bad uh it's very hard to say as well but I guess if you're well well I guess you shouldn't be trading coins unless

you know what you're doing uh then there's a lot of very high risk involved with all this uh tokens um yeah I think this is a price chart we have trading view integrated so it comes with all the indicators that you want to plug in to use uh you can kind of draw them and draw them out I think the cool part as well is we we have this um this list of past transactions so this is one thing that is a lot better than coin gecko in the sense that we track all past trades for um for the token Trader on the deck so this is all the trades that happen if you want to see that The Ether scan that I mean the the block Explorer transaction you can click on this and go to RB scan so it kind of goes all the

way back for example with all the transactions that you can kind of see um so yeah yeah that's that's that's kind of like the the gecko terminated nutshell I suppose yeah you guys are like a like an aggregator of blockchain data across all the networks and all the exchanges like it's not just you know ether scan for ethereum transactions and RB scan for arbitrum it's like go to gecko terminal you guys have all the transactions on the blockchain anything that can be yeah yeah yeah in a sense it's like a very specialized ether scan for example uh purely focused on price tracking only instead of a generalized uh tracker for Block explorers and instead of just one

X One X one one chain we kind of track all the chains and the aim is to basically track every single trade on the decks trading on any layer zero one two three who knows what will show up put it on uh but but and and we're kind of working on our it's very fast and simple for us to add a new decks on an evm chain uh but we are working on adding all the non-evm chain to kind of make this the most comprehensive tax Tracker out there in the market yeah and that that'll be such a tool for Arbitrage traders to detect opportunities that may go back and forth between evm chains or non-evm chains and and they'll be able to use that you know

right there and can we can we trade like from this terminal no there's no trading involved yet at this stage so um what we do have oops kind of running to an error here uh what we do have is basically uh this button here the trade swap on uni swap which will bring up the unisoft page for you to make a swap got it got it okay very cool very cool cool you you can stop sharing now I think I think that gives our audience a great uh view of gecko terminal and all all of the uh all the features that it has um Beyond just uh coin Deco um in addition to some just API features

yeah I just wanted to point out a real quick as well uh before I stop sharing that that we have this thing that we just launched the API on geckothermia so all this data like a lot of the data that you see on this page can be is made available on our API so uh yeah when you're if you if you are interested take a look and uh it's kind of limited to 10 calls per minute but you need more calls just let us know and and we'll be open to to opening things up for the for you guys but yeah there's a lot of data or basically the prices of all the long tail of tokens that you see on get the terminal is available as well so yeah I just wanted to plug that in and share awesome yeah guys if you if you use the

API let them know you're from the roll up they'll open up the API calls and we'll uh we'll ramp you up and uh yeah we'll make sure you guys get the data that you need um Bobby this has been an absolute pleasure I'm I'm still um I'm still just you know really curious about your vision for the tokenized world ahead of us um it makes total sense you know everything that beat can be tokenized will be tokenized how do you think that will change our view of finance and economics right now um you know with kind of like the black box traditional finance and equities markets and and you know kind of the fragmentation of it how do you think a tokenized world will bring everything

together yeah I think this gets very philosophical uh especially with all the bank runs that is happening right now it's funny how uh what's happening with Silicon Valley Banks silvergate and uh Signature Bank um actually the reason why I got into uh Bitcoin back in 2014 2013 actually was mainly because of the race of Bank runs and I always felt that money that I have in the bank um was not really money that I own in the sense that well one the bank can fail and we've seen it very clearly in the past few weeks number two is the government can decide to seize the money they have in the bank anytime they wish

to for whatever reason that they want to and I think this was mainly driven because I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs having the PayPal account Frozen for no reason or maybe there's some reasons uh but it was really hard to kind of work through customer service to get those accounts unfrozen and that was kind of a pain uh whereas Bitcoin by itself like you know you have full self-surgery of your money no one can take it away from you if you have full control of it um uh I think the other part that that really drive me into crypto and I believe um I believe very strongly in it is because of the monetary policy of uh Bitcoin and ethereum as well uh broadly in the sense that the monetary Supply especially for Bitcoin is very fixed

there is a 21 million coins that will be created until year two and four zero everyone knows the rules the rules can be changed unless more than 51 of the network agrees to it I mean I mean who knows if it will change but at the point at this point in time most likely you would have changed for the near future uh whereas if you compare that with uh the traditional Financial system uh when I first I uh back in 2013 and also there was we were going through massive quantitative easing we were printing billions trillions of dollars and at the back of my head yeah this is needed to kind of fix the financial crisis the global financial crisis of 2009 but how much more do we need to print to

really fix this issue it seems to me that we are printing way too much money way too quickly and maybe way too long uh and this was in 2013 and and and we didn't really get off this quantitative easing drug until I didn't last 2020. last year it was struggling so that that was that seems like an issue to me and uh crypto or more broadly Bitcoin and to some extent ethereum is a deflationary currency and uh that sort of aimed to fix the monetary Supply who knows what the interest rate will be next month I mean it's decided by a group of people in a room and they get to decide

our our circumstances I suppose so um Bitcoin and I guess to some extent ethereum and the rest changes that like in the sense that you know the the monetary Supply so yeah that those are the two big factors I would say that that drove me into crypto and I think more than ever we see these reasons holding true again with all the things that's happened in the past few weeks yeah yeah most definitely and we're you know we see like these currency Wars where Bitcoin and eth are now giving uh citizens of the internet a opportunity for a currency that is apolitical the first currencies that are apolitical that aren't tied to a country Bitcoin and ether are now giving uh you know the citizens of the internet a chance to

instantiate their monetary policy however they see fit almost giving the power back to the people um and it's very exciting to see this this new form of economy uh and governance and and currency formed right right before our eyes as the internet matures um it was an absolute pleasure Bobby thank you for for joining the show pleasure um everyone who's who's listening will drop a link to gecko terminal uh in the description so you guys can check it out and Bobby where should our audience find you on Twitter yeah I'm I'm available on Twitter I'm at Bobby Ong on Twitter so feel free to drop me a photo and uh drop me a DM if you if you have any questions to me awesome it's a pleasure cheers great talking to you