CashboardGlossary · Trading
What is market cap?
Market cap is an asset's price multiplied by its circulating supply. It is the number ranking sites use to size crypto assets and put them in order.
How is market cap calculated?
The math is one line. A token at $2 with 500 million tokens circulating has a $1 billion market cap. When a site says a coin is ranked 40th, that is a statement about price times supply. It says nothing about usage or revenue.
Circulating supply is the weak input. It leaves out locked, unvested and some treasury tokens, and data providers do not always agree on which wallets to exclude, so one token can show two different caps on two sites. A token with a small circulating share can look cheap while large unlocks are still ahead.
Market cap also tells you nothing about how much money it takes to move the price. A token with a $500 million cap and $2 million of pool liquidity can drop hard on a single big sell, because the cap assumes every token could be sold at the last traded price. They could not.
So read it next to FDV, volume and liquidity. In the memecoin trenches, market cap is also just the unit people talk in. Buying at a 50k cap means the whole token was valued at $50,000 when you got in.
Also called: market capitalization, circulating market cap, mcap.
Where does market cap show up in Cashboard?
The Prices widget shows market cap, CoinGecko's market cap rank and 24h volume for each asset you track (rows priced from the Binance fallback show none of these), and can sort your list by cap. Launchpad radar quotes market cap for brand-new launchpad tokens too, though some LaunchLab rows come without a dollar figure. Cashboard does not rank the whole market.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between market cap and FDV?
Market cap counts only the circulating supply. FDV counts the maximum or total supply. The gap between the two is roughly how much supply is still waiting to hit the market.
Where can you read more about market cap?
Related terms
Last reviewed . Market data in Cashboard comes from the providers named on each widget and may be delayed. Nothing here is financial advice.