Sure, Bitcoin Could Hit $100K This Year, but Risks Loom: CoinGecko COO

Sure, Bitcoin Could Hit $100K This Year, but Risks Loom: CoinGecko COO

CoinGecko calls itself one of the world's largest independent cryptocurrency data aggregators.

Based in Kuala Lumpur, the service was launched seven years ago to provide fundamental analysis of the crypto market. Today it tracks price, volume, market capitalization, open-source code development, and other metrics on a dizzying number of crypto projects -- some you've heard of and other space-age named ones you likely haven't.

"Back in 2013, there weren't enough cryptocurrency resources available to do research in the market," Bobby Ong, CoinGecko's chief operating officer told TheStreet. 

So, he said, he and now-CEO TM Lee "brainstormed on a few ideas" and eventually decided to build the crypto-data aggregator that today is CoinGecko.

"We wanted a lot of the data we collected for our own research purposes," he said. 

After years of hard work and "hustle," CoinGecko is now one of the top 500 most visited websites globally, scoring 200 million page views in February, said Ong. The firm has also put out two books on crypto, "How to Bitcoin - Beginner's guide to Bitcoin" and "How to DeFi - Beginner's guide to Decentralized Finance (DeFi)."

TheStreet interviewed Ong about the state of crypto, his views on hot crypto projects like those digital art "non-fungible tokens," the risks awaiting