Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Ergo has rejected the $5,000 fee demanded by CoinMarketCap (CMC) to update the circulating supply of the Ergo (ERG) token. It states that CoinMarketCap’s six-step data checking process is much more complicated than that of its competitor CoinGecko.
CoinMarketCap asked Ergo to post on social media so that CMC could verify that the requested data changes had been posted on the project’s website. The mail must contain the CMC ticket number.
Ergo says the cost of verification is too high
CMC told Ergo that it needed this information to bill Ergo for the requested update. Successful verification would require a $5,000 fee before CMC updates the circulating offer.
Ergo CoinMarketCap application | Source: Ergo
Ergo suggested that the high fees could discourage regular updating of the data. This in turn could mean that much of the information CMC hosts is considered irrelevant.
“It begs the question… how much general data is out of sync on CMC for projects that refuse to pay these hostage fees? Data integrity issues are a no brainer for #CMC as accuracy is their product. Let’s clean this up!”
Founded in 2013 by a programmer from New York, CMC provides cryptocurrency statistics such as prices, trading volumes and market capitalization. The platform was acquired by crypto exchange Binance in 2020 for a reported fee of $400 million.
Read more: What is market capitalization? Why is it important in crypto?
CoinMarketCap attracted attention
A listing on the platform can mean the difference between the successes and failures of smaller altcoins. CMC has faced criticism for its allegedly opaque listing criteria and its outsized role in retail trading and links to crypto exchanges.
Read more: 10 Best P2P Crypto Exchanges You Need to Know About in 2023
CMC competitor CoinGecko, founded a year later, claims to independently collect and aggregate cryptocurrency data and charges a fee for an ad-free trading experience. The website claims that the independent aggregation and application programming interface is superior to the free API exchanges that developers offer.
This is because, even if verified, an asset price from an exchange will only reflect the activity in that exchange’s order book. At the time of writing, CMC had not yet responded to the Ergo survey.