All terms
Price multiplied by circulating supply. Far more useful than price alone.
Market cap tells you what the whole network is currently valued at. A token at three cents is not cheap and a token at 60000 dollars is not expensive. Only market cap lets you compare them.
Be careful with fully diluted valuation, which uses total supply including tokens not yet released. A project with a small circulating supply and a huge future supply can look far cheaper than it is.
A token at 0.001 dollars with 100 billion supply has a 100 million dollar market cap. Doubling it needs another 100 million dollars of buying.
That a low market cap makes something cheap. Market cap is price times supply, so a token at a thousandth of a cent can be worth more than one at ten dollars. Comparing prices between tokens is meaningless; comparing market caps is the beginning of an argument.
Common questions
Why is market cap more useful than price?
Can market cap be misleading?
Where this comes up on the site
The guides that actually use this word, rather than a list of everything we have written.
Where to go next
More trading terms
Want this explained out loud?
Some of these land faster in conversation than in writing. Sessions are one to one and you can ask anything, including the things that feel too obvious to ask.