Bitcoin's market capitalization by itself: price times circulating supply. It is the cleanest of the totals by a distance. Bitcoin's supply is known exactly and by rule, its price comes from deep liquid markets, and there is no estimate anywhere in the calculation.
Live. The figure above updates in your browser while this page is open, and the page was built with a real one in it rather than a blank.
The plain description
Bitcoin's market capitalization by itself: price times circulating supply.
It is the cleanest of the totals by a distance. Bitcoin's supply is known exactly and by rule, its price comes from deep liquid markets, and there is no estimate anywhere in the calculation.
Stated so you could reproduce it
Bitcoin price multiplied by circulating supply. On this board it is derived as TOTAL multiplied by Bitcoin dominance, which gives the same figure from the data already being read.
Circulating supply is what has been mined less coins that are provably unspendable. Coins whose keys are lost are still counted, because nobody can prove they are gone.
The bands, and what each one actually means
| Reading | What it indicates |
|---|---|
| Against TOTAL2 | The core comparison. Which of the two is leading tells you what kind of market this is. |
| Against its own history | Bitcoin's cap crossing the market cap of a well known company or commodity is the comparison that circulates in the press. It makes for a headline and carries no information about price. |
The part that gets left out
- Lost coins are counted. Estimates of permanently lost Bitcoin run into the millions of coins, and all of them are in this number.
- Market cap is not the cost to buy all of it. Buying the last coin at the current price is possible; buying every coin at the current price is not.
- "TOTAL1" is trading platform shorthand rather than an official series name, and not every platform defines it the same way.