Alternative price feed sources are on the table; however, it gets more complicated without CoinMarketCap:
- Maintainability: APIs change, and each of them have their own quirks to work out.
- Weighted averages: To get closer to the actual market value, one should look at the average price across the STEEM exchanges, weighted by trading volume. CoinMarketCap does this very well already, and it would be a challenge to clone CoinMarketCap to keep the average prices feature.
- Service unavailable: The various markets and alternative price feeds may decide to deny service to the client, which could either prevent a price feed update or skew the weighted average.
- More bandwidth: Asking other sources multiplies the number of API requests necessary to obtain prices.
I will add here that we also keep an eye on the price feed manually. Just recently the bandwidth of our node ran out and stalled the price feed for a short while. The update interval has since been increased to every 15 minutes.