Open any cryptocurrency ranking, including ours, and you will see the same columns beside each asset: price, market capitalisation, 24-hour volume, and usually a fully diluted valuation. They look like four ways of saying the same thing. They are not, and the differences between them explain a great deal about why an asset that looks cheap is often nothing of the sort.
Price is the least useful number on the page
A coin trading at $0.0003 is not cheaper than one trading at $60,000. It has a different supply.
This sounds obvious written down, and it is still the single most common error in crypto. The instinct comes from equities, where share prices sit in a broadly similar range and a $4 stock genuinely is cheaper than a $400 one. Cryptocurrencies have no such convention. A project can issue a thousand tokens or a hundred trillion, and that decision — made once, arbitrarily, at launch — sets the price level for the asset's entire life.
The consequence is that a low unit price tells you nothing whatsoever about value, and the phrase "it only needs to reach a dollar" is a sentence about supply that the speaker has not finished thinking through. If a token has 500 billion units in circulation, a dollar per token implies a $500 billion valuation, which would place it among the largest assets on earth. The price looks reachable. The valuation it implies is not.
Market capitalisation: price times circulating supply
Market cap is the number that lets you compare two assets meaningfully. It is calculated as:
Market cap = current price × circulating supply
Circulating supply means the tokens actually available and trading — excluding, in principle, tokens that are locked, reserved, unissued or provably burned. Market cap is therefore an estimate of what the market currently values the whole project at, and it is the right basis for the comparison people are usually trying to make when they look at price.
It is also the number that makes size legible. An asset with a $40 million market cap and one with a $40 billion market cap are not slightly different; the second is a thousand times larger, with correspondingly deeper liquidity, broader ownership and more established infrastructure. Moving the first by fifty percent might take a few hundred thousand dollars of buying. Moving the second by fifty percent takes something closer to a macroeconomic event.
Where market cap misleads
Market cap is a multiplication, not a measurement of money invested. This is worth sitting with, because the intuition that a $1 billion market cap means a billion dollars went in is wrong and leads people astray.
The last trade sets the price, and that price is applied to every unit in existence. If a token trades once at $2 on a purchase of a few thousand dollars, and there are 500 million units, the market cap is now a billion dollars — created by a trade worth less than a used car. Nobody could realise that billion, because selling into the order book would collapse the price long before a fraction of the supply cleared.
The gap between the notional figure and what could actually be extracted widens as liquidity thins. For the largest assets it is modest. For a small token with a shallow order book, market cap can overstate realisable value by an order of magnitude or more. This is also why "market cap wiped out" headlines during a sell-off overstate what happened: no such sum ever existed in cash.
The other weakness is the supply input. Circulating supply is reported by projects and by data aggregators, and definitions vary at the edges. Are tokens held by the founding team circulating? Tokens in a treasury the team controls? Tokens locked in a contract with a key someone holds? Different sources answer differently, which is why two reputable sites can show different market caps for the same asset at the same moment.
Fully diluted valuation: what it costs if everything unlocks
FDV applies the current price to the maximum supply rather than the circulating supply:
FDV = current price × maximum supply
If a token has 100 million units circulating out of a billion that will eventually exist, FDV is ten times market cap. That ratio is the useful part.
A large gap between market cap and FDV means most of the supply has not entered the market yet. Those tokens are typically allocated to the team, early investors, a treasury and future incentive programmes, and they usually arrive on a schedule published in the project's documentation. When they do, they land in a market that has to absorb them. Existing holders are diluted in exactly the way shareholders are diluted by a new share issue, except that in crypto the schedule is usually known in advance and the amounts are often far larger in proportional terms.
A token where market cap and FDV are close has already issued most of what it ever will. Whatever else is true about it, future supply is not an overhang.
FDV has its own distortion, which is that it prices tokens that do not yet exist at today's price. If the market cannot absorb the new supply without the price falling — and it usually cannot — FDV describes a valuation that will never be reached at that price. Read it as a measure of how much dilution is pending, not as a target.
Volume: the number that validates the others
Twenty-four-hour volume is the total value traded across the exchanges a data provider tracks. It is the closest thing on the page to a measure of whether anyone is actually there.
Volume matters because price and market cap are both derived from trades, and a number derived from very few trades is fragile. Two questions make it useful. First, is volume large relative to market cap? A ratio of a few percent is normal for an actively traded asset. A ratio near zero means the price on screen may reflect a trade from hours ago in a market where you could not sell a meaningful position without moving it. A ratio far above one — daily volume several times the entire market cap — is unusual enough to warrant suspicion, since it implies the whole float changing hands repeatedly in a day.
Second, where is the volume? Concentration on a single small exchange is a materially different situation from volume spread across a dozen venues, because it makes the price dependent on one venue's order book and one company's continued operation.
Reported volume also has a well-documented integrity problem. Wash trading — buying and selling with oneself to manufacture activity — has been widespread, historically at exchanges whose ranking depended on volume figures. This is why serious data providers weight or filter volume rather than summing it, and why a coin that appears heavily traded on venues you have never heard of deserves scepticism.
Reading the four numbers together
Individually each figure can be misread. Together they form a reasonably honest picture.
Start with market cap, because it establishes scale and rules out the price illusion. Check volume against it to establish whether the market cap is supported by real trading or is a notional figure resting on a handful of transactions. Compare FDV against market cap to see how much supply is still to come, and if the gap is large, look up when it arrives. Look at price last, because on its own it carries almost no information.
Applied to a real example, the process is quick. A token priced at a tenth of a cent, with a $30 million market cap, $80,000 of daily volume, and an FDV of $400 million is telling you something specific: it is small, barely traded, and more than ninety percent of its eventual supply has yet to be issued. None of that is visible in the price. All of it matters.
A note on what these numbers cannot do
These are market metrics. They describe how an asset is being priced and traded; they say nothing about whether the underlying project works, is used, or will exist in three years. A large market cap reflects consensus, and consensus has been wrong at enormous scale in this market more than once. Treat these figures as the questions that let you rule things out quickly, not as the answer.
Coinvilo publishes live market cap, volume, supply and fully diluted valuation for thousands of assets. This article is educational and is not financial, investment or tax advice. Cryptocurrency prices are volatile and you can lose money.