Crypto used to be driven almost entirely by hype, by speculation, and by whoever shouted the loudest on social media. Now that is changing fast. Banks, pension funds, and sovereign wealth are moving in — and they do not move on hype. They move on data. Joining me is Alice Liu, Head of Research at CoinMarketCap. Alice, welcome to Wall Street to Mena.
Thanks for having me.
Walk us through what actually happens when your team decides to research a new coin or a trend. Where do they start?
As you mentioned, the market is maturing and there are a lot of data points. When I look at new projects I do two things. Number one, I follow the attention. Number two, I follow the capital. When it comes to attention, we look at user activity and network behaviour. When it comes to price, CoinMarketCap provides liquidation data, volume data, pricing, trading, and all of those that I monitor and model.
What kind of data are you actually looking at? Is it price movement? Social media activity?
We look at price — not just trading price on exchanges, but price on-chain on the blockchain. We look at user network behaviour. We also look at liquidation data. And as you mentioned, banks and traditional finance institutions are coming in, so we monitor ETF flows and social trends on that basis as well.
You came from JP Morgan before CoinMarketCap. What did you bring from that world into crypto research?
It is quite a different world. I was doing investment research in a market that trades seven hours, five days a week, and now it is 24 over seven. A lot of things we borrow — how to analyse a portfolio, how to measure risk, how to measure positions. We apply those into crypto. We now look at the macro side as well. How is the Fed's decision going to impact crypto price? What does Bitcoin's correlation with gold look like? We do a lot more TradFi systematic research when it comes to crypto.
With 50 million tokens in existence, how do you tell what is real from what is just marketing and hype?
Crypto is never short of stories. For us as a team, we use a lot of tools to make sure the data has integrity. We look at the details of the projects — their business, their positioning, their ecosystem. But we also monitor the trading side — across centralised and decentralised exchanges, we look at trade volume and make sure there are no outlier data points.
Trends seem to burn out in about two weeks. Does the research process have to move faster now?
We have about 900 million page views per month. Things in crypto stay very fast paced. When altcoin season comes in, we see pumps in meme coins and DeFi tokens. For us, that means staying up with the trend. We monitor different categories — stablecoin flows, meme coins, what is pumping and why. We monitor not just price and trading, but also what the community is saying.
What is the hardest trend to monitor?
Honestly, it is often around meme coins and major market events. But most recently, what is very interesting is the return of traditional finance — specifically IPOs. On the SpaceX listing and the Chinese chipmaker CSMT, crypto was generating around $3 billion in volume. And what we found is that crypto is pricing the trading price 70 times more accurately than what the book runners are projecting. That is very interesting. Crypto is better at discovering the IPO price than traditional markets when a big event like this comes in.
How does that explain the return of IPOs?
IPOs are usually limited to local markets. But with crypto tools and spot products, you access a much wider audience base. More volume comes in. And with 24 over seven trading behind the market, pricing is more accurate and more accessible. That is crypto's role in this new wave.
When institutions come to CoinMarketCap for research, what are they actually looking for?
They are used to structured reports. So we provide API access with much higher data frequency and deeper research analysis. We do not just look at what is trending — we look at why and what is behind it. Institutional clients either want portfolio risk management or deep infrastructure analysis of specific projects. We provide both.
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you for having me.
