CoinMarketCap Adds New “Letter Grade” Rating System

CoinMarketCap, the most popular market data aggregator, has added a new rating system to its site. A third-party metric called the Fundamental Crypto Asset Score (FCAS) was quietly added this week. Rather than ranking cryptocurrencies by market cap, FCAS assigns letter grades based on each coin’s “health,” as seen below:

How Does It Work?

By default, CoinMarketCap and most other market aggregators rank cryptocurrencies by their market cap. This measure is simply the total price of a cryptocurrency’s entire coin supply. Unfortunately, market cap data can be easily manipulated, and prices are always in flux. FCAS is one of several alternatives.

FCAS provides a weighted measurement of each cryptocurrency based on the activity of its users and developers. Market data also comes into play, but to a lesser extent. The end result is a picture of how active a particular crypto project is. This should be useful for investors, who earn from growth. FCAS explains:

“Thinking about investing in a coin? You probably want to get involved if the user base has grown 200% in the last 3 months. Did a particular project catch your eye? Maybe consider passing if the development community has been dormant for the past 6 months.”

FCAS and its data are being provided by a third-party company called Flipside Crypto, which has been backed by several different crypto investors including Coinbase. To some, these names may suggest that FCAS has a bright future, but the rating system’s corporate ties and possible bias will probably not win over skeptics.

Public Reception

Perception is already a problem. Although CoinMarketCap is popular, it is controversial. Over the past year, many have accused the site of providing inaccurate market data due to the way that it handles exchange data. Last summer, the criticisms became severe enough that CoinMarketCap decided to make major changes to its site.

However, many people still harbor a grudge against CoinMarketCap, and the site’s new FCAS plugin has been poorly received on social media. The fact that FCAS has given an “F” to various high-ranking cryptocurrencies is probably not helping matters, either. Binance Coin, Tether, and Nano have all received failing grades.

In any case, it is extremely unlikely that FCAS will replace market cap measurements as a widespread crypto ranking tool. Then again, CoinMarketCap has a larger audience than any of its competitors, and it certainly has the capacity to raise the visibility of FCAS—whether anybody likes it or not.