CoinGecko's Crypto Price Aggregation Methodology

Learn how CoinGecko aggregates prices across exchanges, filters outliers, and traces coin prices back to its source

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Trusted by Industry Leaders

Trusted by Industry Leaders

ASSESSING DATA PROVIDERS

Why Crypto Prices Vary Across Providers

Most teams evaluate data providers on coverage and price – but when discrepancies appear, the question shifts to methodology, transparency, and auditability

Regulators require pricing methodology to be verifiable

MiCA requires CASPs to demonstrate transparent market data sourcing, and FASB ASU 2023-08 mandates fair value measurement

Unfiltered aggregation produces unreliable prices

Aggregating across exchanges without filtering for fake volume or manipulation produces a number that looks precise, but isn't

Most providers gate or have undisclosed methodologies

When pricing methodology is not publicly accessible, evaluators have no way to independently verify the accuracy of the published price

METHODOLOGY BREAKDOWN

How CoinGecko Calculates Crypto Prices

A five-step pipeline from raw exchange data to verified published price, with full attribution at every step

STEP 1

Derive the Bitcoin Price Index

CoinGecko first calculates a Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) by averaging BTC prices across reputed exchanges. The volume-weighted average price (VWAP) becomes the single reference point for every other coin.

STEP 2

Select the top 600 most liquid trading pairs for each coin

For each coin, CoinGecko ranks every active trading pair by volume and selects the top 600. Low-volume pairs on smaller exchanges are excluded. Prices are normalized to a common base via BPI.

STEP 3

Remove price outliers

The Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) algorithm identifies exchange prices that deviate significantly from the majority and removes them before aggregation. For coins with fewer than 3 tickers, any price change over 100x is flagged.

STEP 4

Aggregate into the published price

Remaining tickers are combined using a volume-weighted average, so higher-volume exchanges carry more weight in the final number. The result is the published price, traceable to every contributing exchange, its Trust Score, and the exact timestamp.

STEP 5

Filter exchange volumes

CoinGecko applies the same filtering to exchange volumes: blacklisted pairs are excluded, and pairs inactive for over 3 hours are dropped. Reported 24h volume figures reflect only active, filtered trading data.

ACCURATE, RELIABLE, VERIFIABLE

Why Trust CoinGecko's Pricing

Our prices are derived through documented methodology that prioritizes active markets, with safeguards that filter unreliable data at scale

Published outlier detection for self-serve evaluation

Our MAD-based filtering methodology is publicly documented. From methodology to independent audits, everything you need to evaluate us is publicly accessible.

SOC 2 Type I & SOC 2 Type II Certified

Independent audit verifies security controls, data integrity, and operational processes meet enterprise governance standards.

99.9% Uptime SLA

Enterprise customers rely on us for dependable access to crypto market data, backed by a 99.9% uptime SLA and production-grade infrastructure powering CoinGecko.com (150M+ monthly traffic at peak).