Every coin page on this site — Bitcoin, Ethereum, any of the top 250 — shows the same handful of numbers. Most people read the price and ignore the rest. The rest is where the actual information is.

Price is the least informative number

A token at $0.02 is not cheap and one at $60,000 is not expensive. Price is market cap divided by supply, and supply is an arbitrary decision made by whoever launched the token. A project can issue a trillion tokens or twenty-one million; the price per unit changes enormously and the size of the thing does not change at all.

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in retail crypto. “It only needs to reach $1” is a sentence that ignores what reaching $1 would imply about total value.

Market cap: what the market currently says it is worth

Market capitalization is price multiplied by circulating supply — the tokens actually in circulation now. It is the standard way to compare the size of two assets, and it is what our coin tables rank by.

Its limits are worth knowing. It does not measure how much money went in, and a thin market can support a large market cap on very little real buying. A $500 million market cap with $2 million of daily volume is a different proposition from the same cap with $200 million of volume, which is why liquidity sits next to it on every page.

FDV: what it would be worth if every token existed today

Fully diluted valuation uses maximum supply instead of circulating supply. The gap between market cap and FDV is the part almost nobody checks, and it is the most predictive number on the page.

If a token has a $200 million market cap and a $2 billion FDV, then ninety per cent of the eventual supply does not exist yet. It will arrive — through vesting schedules, team allocations, staking rewards or investor unlocks — and it will arrive into the same market you are buying in. That is future selling pressure with a known schedule and an unknown price.

A small gap means most of the supply is already out. A large gap is not automatically bad, but it is always something to look up: who holds the unissued portion and when can they sell.

The three supply figures, and why there are three

  • Circulating supply — tokens available and tradeable now. Drives market cap.
  • Total supply — tokens that exist, including any locked or not yet distributed, minus anything verifiably burned.
  • Maximum supply — the hard ceiling written into the protocol, where one exists. Bitcoin has 21 million. Many tokens have no maximum at all, which our pages show as a dash rather than a number.

No maximum supply means issuance is open-ended. That is not necessarily a flaw — Ethereum has no cap and issues to secure the network — but it does mean the scarcity argument people make about Bitcoin does not transfer.

Reading the rest of the page in thirty seconds

Once the supply picture is clear, the remaining numbers are quick:

  • 24h volume against market cap. A ratio far below a per cent or so suggests you may struggle to exit at the quoted price.
  • All-time high and the distance from it. Context, not a prediction. An asset 80% below its high needs a fivefold move to recover it.
  • 24h range. Today’s actual volatility, which is more honest than any label.

Do that on any coin page and you will have asked better questions than most buyers do. To see the same numbers priced in your own currency, our converter covers 59 of them.

Nothing here is financial advice. See our risk disclaimer.