Quote from site moderator on January 6, 2019, 9:29 am

CoinMarketCap stands for data transparency and clarity.At CoinMarketCap, we believe in transparency and openness in our data. All the information that you see on our site is aggregated from hundreds of exchanges based on the APIs that they provide us. When we list exchanges, we do our best to verify with exchanges that the APIs they provide us will pipe through the freshest and most accurate data possible.

CoinMarketCap is a platform created to track the capitalization of different cryptocurrencies, the amount of trades that use them and the current price converted into fiat currencies. The information updates every five minutes. Cryptocurrency market capitalization means multiplying the total of all issued coins derived from mining by the current cryptocurrency market price. Market capitalization defines the popularity of certain cryptocurrencies. Capitalization, rather than a cryptocurrency’s price, is the main economic indicator. CoinMarketCap’s service provides information about all digital currencies that are traded in at least one public exchange and have a non-zero trading volume. The CoinMarketCap app can function as a kind of rating system that shows a list of cryptocurrencies sorted in descending order by their capitalization amount.