Best Tool to Find Explosive Crypto’s Early CoinMarketCap vs CoinGecko
Alex from CoinPix Capital shows how to find undervalued altcoins on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko by ignoring market cap rankings and focusing on liquidity depth instead. He walks through both platforms' tools, explains how small liquidity pools can spike prices 700%, and warns that token creators manipulate circulating supply to fake their coin's size.
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In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to find undervalued altcoins on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. These are 2 tools that I've used since the beginning of my entire crypto journey. And this is pretty much where I find all of my information. I'm going to compare them. I'm going to contrast them. I'm going to show you the pros and cons of both platforms and more importantly, exactly how I use it, because there's so much different statistics and data and all these things on this website. And most of it is useless. So let me show you exactly what I'm talking about. By the way, if you're new here, my name is Alex and I've been in cryptocurrency for 8 years, full-time for 6. I bought Ethereum at $3, made millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars, and now I'm at a point where I created CoinPix Capital and I make these videos as a way to connect with other investors. So both CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko are websites that display all the information for coins on on the internet, every coin that's kind of relevant. Now there's more coins that they don't list. They have a specific kind of like checklist they use to list certain coins, so they don't put every single coin in the world, but they do give you a really, really good basis of understanding. It's kind of like a place where you can find everything about the coin, and I use it for pretty much all of my research. Really, I use CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap as a basis for pretty much everything. And so I want to show you all the little tools, but first you have to comprehend this one thing, which is the most important. For some reason, I don't understand why, they list the coins by market cap. And so in the stock market world, this was really relevant, but in cryptocurrency, it's not as relevant for what we're looking for, which is finding undervalued, very small coins that can do like a 30x, a 50x, 100x. If you want 100x, you do not buy Bitcoin. And it just so happens to be it's the number one coin on these websites. So they're aggregated by market cap. Let's look into it. So the actual formula for market cap is circulating supply times price. So when I have a new investor come to me and they say, hey, I have a microcap coin or a large-cap coin, I know immediately they have no idea what they're talking about. And this is exactly why. Market cap is circulating supply times price. So the thing is, when you create a cryptocurrency, you actually choose the initial price. Not only do you choose that, but you also choose the total supply, not the circulating supply. You choose the total supply and you choose something called tokenomics. So the person has a choice to make, right? They choose exactly the circulating supply and the price. And what they do in cryptocurrency, because it's not regulated, is they finesse it as much as they possibly can. They will on purpose make a very big circulating supply, as big as they possibly can, as big as they can, so that they come up higher on the CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko websites. So again, it is very misleading if you just go to that list and start picking coins that are high up because you think they're better. This is misleading because in cryptocurrency, again, they get to choose— the creator of the coin gets to choose circulating supply and they get to choose the price they start selling it at. So really they're choosing the market cap, and the higher the market cap, the higher you come on the website. So in crypto, this is actually used as a marketing tool. Let me show you. So let's take a look at the case study of Shiba Inu, which is one of the most popular meme coins on the market. We're talking about top 3 in the world, one of the most popular. And the crazy part about it is I actually know somebody that knows the creator, and they said that there's kind of like 2 elements that helped Shiba Inu go really, really viral and go up in price a lot. And by the way, Shiba Inu is not a joke. We should definitely study this because last cycle it was the number one producer by percentage increase. By percentage increase, Shiba Inu would have made you the most money. It was the number one investment of all the altcoin cycle last cycle. So catch what I'm saying right now. He said these 2 points. Number one, on the website they put the price specifically really low, like less than a penny. So for new people, when they think of less than a penny, they think that's cheap, but that's not cheap in the context of investing, right? Cheap only means a price that's low that you could sell for higher. So it doesn't matter if you're buying 107 K BTC or a coin that's a penny, all you care about is the percentage increase because you can get a fraction of a Bitcoin. Listen to what I'm saying. You can get, let's say, 1/10 of a Bitcoin. If that increases by 10% and you have another one that you have like a million coins and that increases by 10%, in both cases, regardless of how much of the coins you have, you only made 10%. So all we care about is percentage increase. Right? So in the case of Shiba Inu, the first element that they finessed is the perception of price. They made the price super low so that all the people in the world could be like, oh my gosh, this is really cheap, I can afford it. The second thing they finessed is the circulating supply. So as you can see right here, the circulating supply is literally like 589 trillion, trillion, trillion, guys. And see, the thing is, what they did is they took half of the supply and they burned it. I believe that's— and I don't know if this is exactly what they did, but they did like half of the supply, they burned it, and they gave the other half like a big portion, uh, to Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum. And basically that's what was, you know, at the top of the prices when Vitalik Buterin started selling the coins. Long story short, they did like some type of finesse in the circulating supply on purpose to make that number really, really high Because they know the formula of these websites is what circulating supply times price, right? So to new investors, it's really cheap, and to the website, it's really high on the market cap website. So all the new investors get to see it, and it looks really cheap, right? So this again is a marketing tactic that is used by coin founders to come up high on the website. So. As an investor, as a trader, your goal is to find really cheap coins, but not in the context of dollar amount. You're trying to find cheap coins that are really small that will increase in price really, really fast. So I'm going to show you exactly how to find those things in this video when we're looking at CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. And I'm also, of course, going to compare and contrast both of them. So if we look at CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, they have this tab, both of them have this tab, and this is one of the most important perspectives when you're researching a coin is to look at the +2 and -2 liquidity depth. So when it comes to cheapness in crypto, it's not about the amount of coins or the price of the coin. Cheapness means liquidity, and I'm gonna explain what that means. I know it's a crazy term for a lot of people, but it is one of the most important factors. If there's one thing you could take away from my video. Forget the websites, just understand liquidity. So please take notes, take your time. But on both websites, you can click the tab called Markets. So for example, we were here, I clicked Markets. And if I come over here to Shiba Inu, same thing on CoinGecko. This is CoinGecko, you click Markets. And right here you can see a +2 and -2 depth. If I put my cursor over it, it says capital required to increase the price by 2%. So as you can see right here, these are all different exchanges where you can buy Shiba Inu. You got Binance, Bybit, Coinbase. On each of these exchanges, it requires about $575,000 to only increase the coin by 2%, right? Look, $450,000. And see, the thing is, this is all combined, meaning if somebody goes in and puts a million dollars on Binance, gonna pump Shiba Inu by 4%, right? Because it's about double this $500,000, right? They pump it 4%. But see, the thing is there's a whole bunch of guys that will go to Coinbase. They have a cheaper Shiba Inu on Coinbase. They'll buy it from Binance. They'll sell it on Coinbase and they'll even out the price. It's called arbitrage. They'll arbitrage. They'll find the differences of price of a coin from one exchange to another. So they'll automatically buy the cheap one and sell it to the exchange that has it more expensive. And then they'll get the price differences and make money off of that, right? So really, it's a combination of all of these to pump Shiba Inu 2%. You have to add pretty much all of these, and we're talking about 30 tabs just to pump Shiba Inu 2%. And it's the same thing on CoinGecko. They have a +2 and -2 liquidity depth. It's the same thing with -2. So for example, if somebody sells 200,000 on Crypto.com, then it could drop Shiba Inu by 2% on that exchange. And then they have to get all of the money from all the other exchanges. So really you have to combine all of these just to figure out exactly how much money it will take to drop the price of Shiba Inu by 2%. And that is a lot of money in context of cryptocurrency. Let me say it again. That is a lot of money. So when it comes to cheapness, again, it has nothing to do with the price of the coin. It really has to do with the liquidity. You want to find coins that have a little bit of liquidity, and then if a lot of money comes in, it pumps it really fast. You want to find +2 liquidity depth of coins that are really, really low, right? And that's the first element when it comes to CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. They have pretty much the same tab, and then they have kind of like 2 different ways they calculate the liquidity depth. And I kind of take an average of both of them. It's not a perfect science. No one really knows the liquidity depth. They have estimations of it, but it does give you a gauge that is important when understanding cheap coins. Let me show you an example of a coin that's really cheap in my perspective, okay? And this is a coin called Navigate. As you can see right here, look at the +2 liquidity depth. You could literally pump this coin with $252. If somebody puts $20,000 into this coin it will fly. And I'm gonna prove it to you because there was a recent live Q&A that we just had on June 20th, and we were going and just kind of dissecting coins with my research system. And I'm going to show you some of that research system in this video with the 2 websites because we do use CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko for the vast majority of our research. But we're looking through it and I found this coin called Navigate. I did not buy the coin. I made a simple video on my YouTube channel And the coin pumped. It went up a lot. It went up almost 700%. Look at that pump, right? So again, when it comes to cheapness, it's all liquidity. And this was kind of like a liquidity masterclass. Look at that. But at the same time, when it comes to liquidity, you have to understand this: not only does it go up fast, but it also drops very fast, as you can see right here. And again, I want to be very clear with everybody, I do not accept paid sponsorship by any coin since the beginning of my career. I do not get paid to promote videos. I make, I really do make money trading. We own a hedge fund. Like, it's, I don't have to worry about that. But the point is, is that it's really showed, this was like a masterclass on liquidity to show you that these coins with low liquidity, they move very, very, very, very, very fast, extremely fast. And this is what most investors are actually looking for. The goal here is not a cheap price. The goal here is not a high or low market cap. All of that is misleading and it doesn't actually make sense when you do the math, and you actually, you know, look into it for yourself, right? Once you actually look into it, you realize that it all has to do with low liquidity that has the potential to have high liquidity. That's it. That's what cheap means on these websites. And both websites have the liquidity depth. If there's one thing from this tutorial that you guys need to get is please understand liquidity to a higher level. And I want to show you the tools in this video, you know, just dive a lot deeper when it comes to liquidity for CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. And so there's kind of one element of CoinGecko that really, really shines. Let me show you. So if you go to CoinGecko and you click markets for any coin that you want, there's 2 tabs here, which is a centralized exchange and a decentralized exchange. So there are 2 different ways you could buy any cryptocurrency in the market. It's a centralized exchange and decentralized exchange. So centralized exchanges are like, as you can see here, KuCoin, Binance, Coinbase. Kind of like, this is what most people use when they're first getting into crypto because it's just the most common. It's a centralized exchange. And I'm not going to go into all the pros and cons of it, but basically on a centralized exchange, you don't actually own your coins. They own your coins and they give you access to it. So we've seen things, for example, like FTX exchange where they filed for bankruptcy and everybody lost all of their money on the centralized exchange. Now personally, I only trade on decentralized exchanges. Now, this is the innovation, one of the biggest innovations of crypto. On a decentralized exchange, you could actually trade one crypto for another while actually retaining ownership of the coin itself. So if the exchange goes bankrupt or gets hacked or whatever, you still have your coins, right? And so this is kind of the benefits of a decentralized exchange. It's a little bit more difficult to use, than a centralized exchange. But the beauty, another big beauty of a decentralized exchange is that you guys can actually see how much liquidity is actually in the decentralized exchange. This is super important, super important. And maybe I'll make a video if you guys want me to make a video on all the Web 3.0 decentralized exchange stuff, leave a comment below. But as you can see right here, okay, if I click centralized exchange, it gives you the plus liquidity depth. So When it comes to liquidity on a centralized exchange, you have to look at the +2. I have not found a greater method for understanding liquidity because they own their own data and they have access. They don't really give that data out. But on a decentralized exchange, we can really see, right, the actual liquidity pools. And I'm not going to go into that, but basically when you trade a coin from another coin, there's a pool of money that's created and that pool of money shows you the liquidity, the actual liquidity. So for example, If you click right here, this is the kind of like software that CoinGecko uses that I don't think CoinMarketCap has access to, or if they do, then I just think this is better. I use, it's called Gecko Terminal, and you can actually click it right here. So Gecko Terminal was created by CoinGecko, and it gives you access to what we care about, which is the liquidity pool. So as you can see right here, it's $4.44 million, in this liquidity pool. So if you wanted to double the price of this coin, you're gonna have to put about $4 to $5 million into this pool and it will double the price. And I'm not going to go over the mechanics just in this video. Again, it is very complex. Uh, you can kind of like use ChatGPT to figure it out, to understand the mechanics behind a DEX, which is a decentralized exchange. Maybe I'll make a part 2 that really explains it. But the point is, is that you could displace this pool. So I want you to imagine 2 different pools, right? One pool that's really small and then another pool that's really big. Just imagine a whale, the same size whale. Let's say it's like a mini whale. It's not that big. You take that whale, you throw it in the small pool. It's going to displace the liquidity in that pool. The water is going to go crazy, right? It's going to go all over the place, splash everywhere. If you take the same size whale and you put it in the bigger pool, it's not going to move it or displace it by that much. There's a very similar effect in these liquidity pools. Okay, the more liquidity the pool has, the less the price increases or decreases. It doesn't— it's not as volatile. Meaning if I put $1 million into this liquidity pool, it's not going to move by that much. Maybe 10% pump, 20% pump, or whatever the case is. But if I come over here and we go to the same coin, Navigate, right, let's look at it. And this is actually how we found Navigate. And I don't think they have— let's go on Gecko Terminal and look up Navigate. I don't think they have it. Let's come over here. N-V-G-8. So if we look at Navigate's liquidity pool and we click it right here on Gecko Terminal, you can see the liquidity is only $137K. So literally, if somebody puts in $137K, they could literally displace this pool and double the price. You see the difference? It's a mat— it's a big difference. And Shiba Inu has way more liquidity. Like, it just— the amount of liquidity Shiba Inu has versus over this coin is like maybe 20 to 50 times more liquidity. So it's going to be much harder to move the price of Shiba Inu versus something like this, right? And so Gecko Terminal excels in this way because they do have this kind of secondary tool That's really, really, really good. I think it's actually— it's my favorite tool to find undervalued altcoins, to be honest with you guys, is Gecko Terminal. And if you guys want me— again, if you want me to make tutorials on all this, please leave a comment below so I understand where your thoughts are at. So if I— if you need like a full Gecko Terminal tutorial, I could do that as well. All right, let's talk about where CoinMarketCap excels. So CoinMarketCap is kind of like the first big website, uh, all of this happened. It's like the longest standing. It's like the gold standard They were purchased by Binance, and they have this really, really cool filters and columns section. And before we get into this, I just want to briefly say that when it comes to listing coins on their website, CoinGecko is a little bit more loose. They list more coins, they have more flexibility. You'll find the coins usually go on CoinGecko before CoinMarketCap, and CoinMarketCap is a little bit more strict. With their rules, which is good because, you know, CoinMarketCap, you probably won't find as many scams. CoinGecko, you know, because it's early, they have very loose parameters. You'll find a lot of scams. So just take that into consideration. I spend a majority of my time on Gecko Terminal because I really know how to weed out the scams. But this tool right here, I believe, is where CoinMarketCap shines. Let me show you. So So they have these 2 kind of like tabs here. One of them is columns and one of them is filters. So if you click columns, you might notice that mine looks completely different from yours. If you actually have it up on your computer, mine looks completely different. So personally, like I told you before, I do not care about price that much. I don't care about market cap. I switched the website around to give me what I want, which is percentage increase. I want percentage increase. I wish they had a +2 liquidity depth thing here. They don't, unfortunately. Maybe one day they'll do that. But I look for a percentage increase, so you can actually customize it. And this is where it's really cool. I love this feature about CoinMarketCap. You can literally pick which ones you want and you can pick the order of it. So for example, I put 7-day, 30-day, 60-day, 90-day percentage increase, year-to-date. And then I look at the TVL, which is a whole nother topic of discussion. The 24-hour volume and the circulating supply. See, there's market cap nowhere in there, right? Because I do not care about market cap. So what I could do, the strategic advantage, is I could actually look at the 90-day best-producing coins. So in the last 90 days, Maple Finance produced 318%. And what this tells me is that this category, we call it narratives, okay? So specifics, I'm not going to go into that, but narratives drive demand. Demand is basically amount of people buying the coin. So if you have a coin with low liquidity but it has a really, really strong narrative, then we have a lot of people buying into a coin that has low liquidity, the price skyrockets, right? So a really good way to understand demand of the entire market, like what right now is really popping off, is finding coins that have gone up in price. So for example, Maple Finance, as you can see right here, Maple Finance has been up 318% in the last 90 days. The last 90 days, it's gone up 318%. So I know that something is cooking right in that area. And then what we do, and I'm not going to go into detail, there's a lot of stuff, it's a lot. This is supposed to be a CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko tutorial. But what we usually do is we actually look into all these coins, and it really tells us on the 90-day perspective what coins are doing really, really well. And it kind of gives us a grasp, okay, this gaming coin, that gaming coin, that came out of the 20 coins that have done well in the last 90 days. 17 of them are AI coins. So something in AI is working. The AI narrative right now is doing very, very well, right? The AI narrative specifically is doing very, very well. So then we adjust our focus of the coins that we are buying and researching to the AI narrative, right? And then we can look at the last 30 days. Aerodrome Finance, this is DeFi. I've been talking about this for a very long time, made a lot of money off Aerodrome Finance. And again, same thing. We know in the last 30 days, Aerodrome, these coins have done well. So this is kind of like more recent. Pudgy Penguins, what's going on, right? And so this gives us kind of a standard of excellence when we're researching coins. A lot of mistakes that people make when they're researching coins or using these websites is they're going based off of their own opinion instead of what's actually working. For example, there's people that always pitch to me. They're always pitching like, uh, these, uh, eco-friendly coins. They're always kind of like, this coin is eco-friendly, it's really, really great. But the problem with this is that I've studied coins that work, and the thing is, is that that narrative, the eco-friendly narrative, does not increase in price. I can prove it. I've not seen one coin has done amazingly well with this narrative, that narrative does not work, right? So when you study the things that work, your picks become better. And what you could do is you could take these standards of excellences— I don't know if that's a word, it's probably not a word— these are like the standard of excellence, and you can match your research with already working to increase the likelihood of you being able to find an undervalued coin. Now you're seeing our system, you're seeing how it's put together. You find the low liquidity altcoins, you match it to something that's working now. Now you have a way better chance of winning. Listen to what I'm saying. This is stuff that people take 6 years to comprehend. That's what happened to me. I went through much trial and tribulation. I've lost $5.2 million in cryptocurrency not doing it the right way. And I'm telling you right now, this is the best method. It's probably the best method you will find on the internet. Now They have another tab. I don't use it as much, but I think it's relevant. You could actually click filters. So now that we see the past 90 days, which coins are doing well, right? We kind of like, this is number one, Maple Finance is doing the best. We can click filters and you can actually start selecting categories. So here's, they call it categories. I call them narratives. I think narratives are probably a more accurate representation of what they actually are, but you have categories. So now we can see, for example, In AI and big data, you can apply it. You can see, wow, these are actually the coins that did the best in AI and big data. And you can get super specific. So the overarching narrative is AI, right? But then now we know whatever the heck this is, it looks like AI agents. There's like a specific narrative within the big narrative, which is AI agent. I know those are doing well. Virtual— these are like, a lot of these are AI agent coins. So I know in the past 90 days those do the best. Look in the last 7 days, okay? This coin's popping off. Whatever this is, let's, let's, let's look at this coin, right? So we can dive a little bit deeper. AGI Alpha Agent. I don't know what this is, but I know it's popping off. Now if we look at the +2 liquidity depth, we can't even see anything. The first thing I see is that it's on Solana, right? So you can see the contracts here. It's actually on Solana. So I don't believe they have— and we can kind of quickly— and this is good that I'm researching it so you can see it in real time. But if we go over here, let's see if we can find this coin on Gecko Terminal. This is the coin on Gecko Terminal, and I want you to look at the liquidity. It is not a lot. Look, the liquidity is at $685K. And see, the thing is, or yeah, $600,000 or whatever the case is. The thing is, is it probably wasn't that liquidity over here. Over here, the liquidity was probably much smaller. So this is like where it's at now. It's still pretty low. But over here it was probably like $100K to $200K. And we always tell people this all the time. We have a liquidity matrix where you can kind of— we've noticed that coins that have a liquidity pool below $200K, those usually do the 50x's. And this kind of proves what I'm saying right now. So something with this coin really, really worked. And I would study it and I'd be like, okay, AI agents works, right? For some reason, whatever they are, I'm not going to look into it now. We could look into it briefly. But Yeah, whatever this is, it really, really worked. And you can start studying the story behind it and comprehend it. The liquidity pool was the right level. The demand was the right level. And it all came from me looking at this screener right here. Now we can look at this other coin here. Look at the last 7 days. It's up 75%, right? Let's look at this one, Swarms. Okay, we can see it briefly. It looks like a pump and dump, but it just recently has gone up in value. It's on Solana as well. So look, Solana coins are popping off. Let's look at this one right here. And we can also look at the liquidity depth so I can show you that it is actually probably a small liquidity pool. You can see that all the ones that pop off have low liquidity depth. Let me show you right here. Let's look and see if swarms are there. So you see I'm using CoinGecko, uh, or Gecko Terminal to really figure out and dive deeper. Look at the liquidity. Okay, it's $2.46 million. So this is a higher liquidity pool. Um, and yeah, like it's still kind of low in the context of like Shiba Inu, but that's a higher liquidity pool. So I'd be careful with that. I would say that, and it only went up 75%, so it kind of makes sense. Let's look at this one right here. Um, let's look at this coin right here. So this looks like a new coin, as you can see. I'm gonna take it. Let's see if there's a +2 liquidity depth. Yeah, look, look at the +2 liquidity depth. Only $2,000 pumps this coin 2%. You see what I'm saying? You see how I'm doing my research? You see how when I adjusted the filters, it gave me a lot of opportunity? It gave me a lot of opportunity, right? And so I can go over here to Gecko Terminal and I can use them in conjunction together, right? Look at it right here. Boom. This one has $300K liquidity, so that's pretty low liquidity. So I'd really research— and to be honest with you, this looks kind of smooth. This actually looks like a good coin because I like $300K liquidity level. Experience the most powerful trading protocol on DeFi. I've actually— I know this coin. We were researching this coin the other day. We were researching this coin the other day. And I'm— there's so many different, uh, variables and perspectives of these websites that, you know, when it comes to this stuff, like, you have to lock in. Like, there's so many different categories and different things and different ways to research. But what I just showed you is what I do the vast majority of the time. I'm looking at Gecko Terminal And we're adjusting the filters to look at exactly what we want. We're basing it on points of credibility, and we're refining our fundamental analysis system to find those specific coins. And I'm not going to go into too much detail. We'll make a part 2 of this video if you guys like it. Thank you so much for watching this. That is kind of like, I would say, 80% of the main features that I use on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. And so if we compare them, just to kind of give you the gist, they both have tools that I use. CoinMarketCap has the filters and the columns, and CoinGecko has the liquidity and you can just dive really deep into these coins. So they both have their cons. There's not one that's really better. I use them both. Thank you guys for watching this video. If you like the quality of this content, hit like. If you don't, leave some constructive criticism. Subscribe for more video updates. And like I always say, if you don't get with it, you will get left behind. Catch you guys in the next video.
