A message from our founder:
Coin Metrics was founded in pursuit of a simple enough vision: characterize the economic nature of the activity on public blockchains. Born as a noncommercial research project, the first iteration was simply charts, data downloads, and some open source tooling dedicated to publishing on-chain data drawn from Bitcoin and its peers. At the core of that work was a simple idea: regular users should have the ability to monitor the key economic outputs of public blockchains. Ideally, the data would be simple, well-documented, de-noised, comprehensible, and free.
Initially, as a side project, it was funded by community donations as well as the founders themselves. In 2018, the project was reoriented into a more commercial entity with the arrival of CEO Tim Rice. CM brought to market a commercial version of the network data product, and, recognizing the lack of credible market data, added business lines dedicated to reference rates and index provision. Later on, CM came to realize that service providers relying on blockchain infrastructure were severely lacking in their ability to detect and remediate anomalies and settlement impairments, so they developed novel network risk measures.
Today, CM offers a full suite of crypto data products, covering the networks themselves, tick by tick exchange data, indexes, and network risk management tools. Much has changed since its origins as a free and open source set of tools, but the core vision remains the same. Even though we maintain a thriving commercial business, CM is as committed as ever to fostering an open data environment around public blockchains. Anyone should be able to run a node and verify key measures like supply or economic throughput, and we fully embrace the philosophy of don’t trust, verify. But blockchain analytics — especially when cross-chain comparisons are sought — can be cumbersome. Thus our community product, offering a blend of market and network data on a number of blockchains, freely downloadable and exportable, is used by thousands daily. We continue to add to the scope of free community data, and have just completed an expansion of this offering which adds over 100 new metrics.
And as we refine our products elucidating the underlying risks and failure modes of these blockchains — whether it’s inflation bugs, reorgs, stoppages, or fee instability — we plan to supplement our existing free data with dashboards pertaining to network risk. No one administers blockchains like Bitcoin, and so it’s up to the community to monitor and evaluate the performance of these systems. This information should not be closed but available to all. Today, CM is the premier full-service crypto data firm catering to an institutional audience. Our data is used by some of the largest names in crypto. While you might expect that our institutional slant would impair our commitment to free data, precisely the opposite is the case. We are more committed than ever to making our network and market data freely available for general use, and we have more resources than ever to make it happen. The open source side of our business is more vibrant than ever, precisely because the commercial wing is doing so well. And this isn’t just a contrived effort to win goodwill — the desire to make blockchain data easy to access is the entire reason Coin Metrics exists. We are excited to continue to honor this commitment for many years to come.