What is market cap in crypto?

Data sites such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap rank coins by market cap, and so does almost everyone else, including us: the coins in our comparer are drawn from the largest by market capitalisation. The figure is easy to calculate, but there is more inside it than the single number suggests.

How is market cap calculated?

Take the current price and multiply it by the circulating supply. A coin trading at €2 with 500 million units in circulation has a market cap of €1 billion. Three supply figures are worth telling apart:

• Circulating supply: the units that can be traded today.
• Total supply: everything already created, including tokens still locked with a team, investors or a foundation.
• Maximum supply: the hard cap, if there is one. Bitcoin stops at 21 million; many coins have no cap at all.

Multiply the price by the maximum supply instead and you get the fully diluted valuation, or FDV. A large gap between FDV and market cap means many tokens are still to be released. Our pages on Ondo and Ethena describe how their unlocks are scheduled.

Why a tiny price says little

A coin priced at a fraction of a cent can look like a bargain, but the low price usually reflects an enormous supply. Shiba Inu has hundreds of trillions of tokens in circulation; for each one to be worth a euro, its market cap would have to exceed that of the entire crypto market many times over. Comparing coins by price per unit is meaningless; compare market caps.

You also never need to buy a whole coin; on most platforms you simply spend an amount in euros. See can you buy a fraction of a bitcoin.

What market cap does not tell you

• The future. It is a snapshot of price and supply, nothing more.
• How much money is in a coin. If holders tried to sell at once, they would get far less than the headline figure, because each sale pushes the price down.
• How easy it is to trade. A large coin can still have thin order books on some exchanges, which shows up as a wider spread and more slippage; see why prices differ between exchanges.

ESMA noted in 2024 that the market is highly concentrated, with a handful of the largest assets accounting for most of its total value. Smaller coins tend to swing harder, and some vanish entirely; ESMA's own warnings remind consumers that crypto can lose all its value.

Where to see it in practice

Each coin page on this site shows the live price next to a comparison of licensed platforms. In compare all coins you can pick any coin from the list and see which exchange gives you the most for your money. Platforms are only included if they hold a licence listed on our MiCA overview.