Market capitalization - usually shortened to market cap - is the simplest size measure in crypto: the last traded price of one coin multiplied by the number of coins in circulation.
The arithmetic
A token trading at $2.00 with 500 million coins circulating has a market cap of $1 billion. Both inputs move it. The same token at $2.20 is a $1.1 billion market cap; so is the same token still at $2.00 after 50 million new coins are issued. Because supply is the second lever, three figures are usually quoted together:
- Circulating supply - coins available and tradable now.
- Total supply - coins already issued, including those locked or reserved.
- Fully diluted valuation (FDV) - price multiplied by the maximum supply that will ever exist. A project with most of its tokens still vesting can show a modest market cap beside a much larger FDV.
What it is not
Market cap is not the amount of money invested in an asset, and not an amount that could be withdrawn from it. It values every unit at the price the most recent unit traded at, and that trade may have been tiny. A thinly traded token can carry a large headline market cap on very little genuine demand, and disposing of a meaningful share of the supply would not realise anything close to the quoted number. Ranking tables built from it compare sizes, not commitment.
Related terms
For treasury companies that hold crypto, market cap is one half of mNAV - the company's market capitalisation measured against the net asset value of the coins it holds. Dominance figures, such as Bitcoin's share of total crypto market cap, are ratios of these same numbers.
In MoonWire analysis
We report market cap as a size and ranking measure, and say which supply definition a cited figure uses when sources disagree. Our explainer on mNAV below 1 works through a case where three published versions of the same ratio disagreed precisely because they used different denominators. A rising market cap is described as a change in size, not as a signal.