CoinMarketCap has acquired Coinglass, the crypto derivatives data platform, the price-tracking site announced on September 25. The transaction is complete, although financial terms were not disclosed. The deal folds Coinglass’s liquidation heatmaps, open-interest dashboards and funding-rate tables into the site used by 115 million people each month, giving CoinMarketCap readers a view of how leveraged traders are positioned alongside the prices they already check. Derivatives make up the largest share of crypto trading, so the move opens a window into a part of the market that the tracker’s spot-focused charts have not shown.
What Coinglass brings
Coinglass has become a standard place to see derivatives activity. Founded in 2019, the platform tracks open interest, funding rates, liquidations, long/short ratios, options and ETF flows across 28 exchanges and more than 2,500 instruments, serving more than five million monthly users and 10,000 API customers. Its liquidation and open interest charts are among the most widely shared in the industry, showing where leveraged positions are concentrated and where forced selling clusters when prices swing. Open interest reflects the total value of outstanding contracts, while funding rates show what longs are paying shorts to hold positions, two gauges traders use to judge how crowded a trade has become.
Coinglass keeps its brand and team
CoinMarketCap framed the deal as a reach expansion rather than a restructuring. “Coinglass built the most trusted view of positioning in crypto by doing one thing very well. Our job is to make that view available to many more people, not to change it. Coinglass stays Coinglass, and nothing changes for its users,” said Rush, CoinMarketCap’s chief executive officer. Coinglass said it will keep operating as an independent business, with its website, app, free tools, API and pricing unchanged.
A data play under Binance
The acquisition extends a data push CoinMarketCap has run since Binance acquired it in April 2020, most recently bringing on-chain data into its CMC AI products. “Coinglass led the way in showing traders worldwide why derivatives matter to market movements. Open interest, funding and liquidations are where the market’s risk is actually taken, and Coinglass made that visible to everyone,” said David Salamon, CoinMarketCap’s chief product officer. For CoinMarketCap, which Binance has kept independent since buying it in 2020, the deal is the latest step in turning a price reference site into a broader market-data business.
