A Binance-owned company just bought the data provider traders use to measure Binance against its biggest rivals.
- CoinMarketCap, the crypto price-tracking and market-data website owned by Binance, said on Sept. 25 that it had completed its acquisition of CoinGlass, a crypto derivatives-data platform widely used to track open interest, funding rates, liquidations and options across crypto exchanges.
- Financial terms weren't disclosed.
The ownership chain is indirect but straightforward. Binance acquired CoinMarketCap in April 2020.
And CoinMarketCap has now acquired CoinGlass.
That puts a company ultimately owned by Binance in control of a platform whose products include rankings and market-share data comparing Binance with rival exchanges.
What is CoinGlass
Founded in 2019, CoinGlass says it covers 28 exchanges and more than 2,500 instruments, serves more than 5 million monthly users and has roughly 10,000 API customers. CoinMarketCap says it reaches 115 million users a month.
But CoinGlass does more than display liquidation charts. Its API provides exchange-level data covering trading volume, open interest and liquidations, while its research reports directly compare the market shares of competing trading platforms.
In its report covering the first half of 2026, CoinGlass ranked Binance first in derivatives volume with roughly $9.3 trillion, or 26.6% of the market it measured.
- Binance also ranked first in average daily open interest at about $24 billion, representing 21.3%.
- OKX, a rival crypto exchange, ranked second in derivatives volume with about $4.2 trillion.
- CME Group, the U.S. derivatives exchange operator, ranked second in open interest with $13.5 billion.
There's no evidence that those figures are inaccurate or that Binance has interfered with CoinGlass's methodology.
But the acquisition revives an old sensitivity around Binance owning companies tasked with measuring the same market in which it competes.
An old controversy
When Binance bought CoinMarketCap in April 2020, the companies said the businesses would remain separate and that Binance would have "no bearing" on CoinMarketCap's rankings.
But six weeks later, on May 14, CoinMarketCap changed its exchange-ranking methodology to incorporate web traffic. And that decision moved Binance to first place.
CoinMarketCap said web traffic was an imperfect proxy for exchange activity and part of an evolving methodology.
Changpeng Zhao, Binance's founder and then-chief executive, also acknowledged at the time that the ranking was heavily influenced by web traffic and was "not 100% accurate."
One way or another, the episode became an early example of the questions surrounding the ownership of a supposedly neutral market data platform by one of the companies it evaluates.
New promises
CoinGlass is now making a similar independence promise. In its press release on Sept. 25, Coinglass said that the company "will continue to operate as an independent business under the Coinglass brand," adding that its website, app, free tools, API and pricing would remain unchanged.
Rush, CoinMarketCap's chief executive, said the company's role was to make CoinGlass available to more users, "not to change it."
The announcement, however, doesn't specify whether CoinGlass's exchange-ranking methodology, exchange-level data, API operations or customer information will be formally separated from CoinMarketCap and its Binance ownership.
It also doesn't say whether information barriers will prevent Binance from accessing non-public CoinGlass data or participating in future decisions involving exchange rankings.