If you're looking for alternative ways of ranking cryptocurrency value, it may be worth checking out CoinGecko. Like our coin market cap ranking tool or coinmarketcap.com, coins are ranked by value. It even bears a slight resemblance in style, for example, with the control to toggle between currencies in which the coins are denominated.

Instead of just looking at market caps, other data examining the attributes behinds the coins' intrinsic value are examined. These fall into 3 categories: Liquidity , developer interest and support, and strength of community.

The latter attribute, for example, is often cited as one of Dogecoin's prime strengths and is at least partially responsible for its rise in market cap. One will observe that according to CoinGecko's tracking, it is indeed ranked as having the strongest community. This is enough to push it into second in overall ranking, despite a mediocre showing in liquidity.

DC Magnates reached out to Bobby CE Ong, co-founder of the site:

How's the site performing thus far?

CoinGecko was launched on 8 April 2014 on the Bitcointalk Forum. Since launch, we have been receiving positive feedback from the community, especially on reddit. People have been using CoinGecko as a good benchmark to measure coins' community and social media strength. The redditors have been quoting our site without prompting. One such example is a post that made it to the front page of the Dogecoin subreddit.

How do you anticipate future performance?

We are very optimistic of our future performance. We are still at a very early stages of development. We launched with 20 coins and now have 45 (and adding more each week). We are also actively adding more metrics. We started with only basic metrics but in the past few weeks have added more to make our ranking more robust and less subject to manipulation. For example we started off by counting only the coins' Reddit subscribers. We are aware that counting only subscriber numbers will subject our metric easy manipulation by people buying fake Reddit subscribers. We have since added the average number of new posts and comments to each coins' subreddit to better gauge activity and the average number of online subscribers.

Do you plan on monetizing the site?

We are thinking very hard on the best way to monetize the site while still making it fair for our users.

You put a new perspective on looking at coin's intrinsic value. Do you anticipate this influencing the coins' actual traded value?

Potentially yes. However we need to understand that the cryptocurrency world is subject to many pumps-and-dumps and this is something that we can never control.

When we started trading Cryptocurrencies , we were buying and selling based on gut feeling. We found out that many people were also doing the same thing - trading based on heresy or gut feeling. If anybody consulted any metrics, it was mainly market capitalization. However using market cap as the only measure is highly flawed because it is easily manipulated by pre-mined coins. We would like to help traders understand and analyze the underlying strength of a coin by evaluating several different criteria. To the extent that traders use our data to make better investment decisions, then yes, it would affect the coins' actual traded volume and potentially traded value.

The sub-headings under Developer (e.g. stars, forks): what do these mean?

They are basically queries the Github or Bitbucket open source code repository for the particular coin. For example, here are the Github repo of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin. If you look at the Bitcoin Github page, you will see some vital statistics on the top of the page.

Watch: There are 768 people watching this repo. These are developers with Github accounts who wants to keep track of the development of this open source repo and some of them are notified via email whenever there are updates to the source code.

Star: 5411 people clicked Star on this repo. These are like people clicking Like on the repo.

Fork: There are 3790 people who have forked this repo to potentially create other coins. For example, Litecoin and Peercoin are forks of Bitcoin, so these 2 forks count towards the 3790.

Commits: 5773- this is the number of times the source code has been changed/updated.

Contributors: There are currently 203 different individuals who have contributed to the Bitcoin source code.

Issues: These are the number of problems raised by developers with regards to the code, along with detail of pending and closed issues.

Merged Pull Request: This is our way of measuring how much of this code has been accepted as part of the core source code repository.

In summary, code repositories which have more Contributors, Commits and Issues indicate a more active developer team. This means that if any bugs are found, the core developers will be quick to fix it.

Code repositories with more Watchers, Stars and Forks indicate that more developers are interested in the coin because of its innovation and would like to track the development or maybe fork the code to create another coin.

Are reward levels/schemes taken into account, as well as mining difficulty?

At the moment no. We may incorporate that in the future if we feel that it plays a strong role in determining value. Mining difficulty is not incorporated at the moment.

We are however interested to incorporate the network hashrate once we find a way to normalize it between the different algorithms, and make an apples-to-apples comparison between hashrates to determine which has a stronger mining community.