Ok, I'll bite as I think I have somewhat of an idea what their underlying value is from this service, even though I admit I don't trade; do you honestly believe that without that rating system offered to the Institutional Investment crowd I mentioned earlier they'd be at even a fraction of their valuation/purchase price?
I ask because gaining a paying client list, which is probably a rounding error in comparison to Binance's current accrued trading fees, cannot really be the main selling point for this deal. Especially when investing in various cryptocurrencies itself is likely to have a higher risk-reward ratio than this API being the best thing since Bitcoin's Layer 2.
It's at best a (minor) value added service, in comparison to the potential of targeting and capturing the (predicted?) incoming waves capital flight risk, now that all this hot money is entering the Economy from China, US, EU, Australia, UK etc...
Standard license is $299/ mo, even with only 3000 paying customers, and there are likely way more than 3000 paying customers, that would be $10M a year in revenue
CMC is a good asset and a valuation/purchase price of $400M is a fair price for the API product only, let alone the ranking /rating aspect
They also have several openings: https://jobs.coinmarketcap.com/employers/293118-coinmarketca...