CoinMarketCap buys CoinGlass, putting Binance behind the liquidation map

CoinMarketCap has bought CoinGlass, the platform traders open to find where liquidations cluster. Neither company named a price. CoinGlass keeps its brand, its team, its website, its app, its free tools, its API and its pricing, which covers everything a user touches. The change sits above all of that.

“Access to derivatives positioning data alongside cryptocurrency prices, including information on where liquidations cluster and how funding rates are moving.”

— CoinMarketCap, on acquiring CoinGlass

CoinMarketCap, announcing the acquisition

CoinGlass measures what prices leave out: open interest, funding rates, liquidations and options flow across 28 exchanges and more than 2,500 instruments, around 89 per venue. Its best-known screen marks the price levels where leveraged positions get force-closed. Reading it is a way of finding where other traders keep their stops.

CoinGlass also publishes the quarterly report that establishes how big Binance is. Its own figures for the first quarter of this year:

• Derivatives volume of about $4.90 trillion, near 34.9% of the top ten venues.
• Average daily open interest of $23.9 billion, near 29.9% of the top ten.
• More volume than second-placed OKX and third-placed Bybit put together, by $1.22 trillion.

Binance republished that report on its own Square feed, and it has cited a CoinMarketCap report for a 36% share of the market. Binance quotes two outside sources on its own size. It owned one of them already, and on Friday it acquired the other.

What happened the last time

Binance closed its purchase of CoinMarketCap on 31 March 2020 and said the exchange would have no bearing on CoinMarketCap rankings. Six weeks later CoinMarketCap replaced its ranking formula, dropping the liquidity metric it had spent months building in favour of one weighted on web traffic. Binance rose from fifteenth place to first. BitMEX fell to 175th. Binance scored a perfect 1,000 on the traffic component, the only exchange to do so. CoinMarketCap's own chief strategy officer, Carylyne Chan, had said in a podcast that web traffic was not a good indicator.

Who measures whom

Binance holds the largest pool of open interest in the market, and CoinGlass draws the public map of where that pool is exposed. No one has produced evidence that the map was altered, and Friday's promises are specific enough to check. Leverage is also where the exchange concentrates its business. We measured that in August: on Binance, Bitcoin futures ran at almost eight times spot volume, a record for the venue, and this month the exchange added options on more than 1,000 US stocks and ETFs. Options are one of the four things CoinGlass counts. The map also covers 28 venues rather than one, so positioning data on OKX, Bybit, Gate and Bitget now reaches the public through a company their largest competitor owns.

Friday's promise covers the product: the brand, the app, the API, the prices. The 2020 promise covered the rankings, and the formula that produced those rankings sat outside it. In a year two questions settle it. Does the liquidation map still cost nothing, and does the API still return the same fields?

Informational material, not investment advice. Neither company disclosed the price, and the figures on Binance come from CoinGlass's own quarterly report.