Market cap, volume and dominance

Three figures appear on almost every Dextape market page: market cap, 24-hour volume and dominance. They come from market-data providers, mainly CoinGecko, and they are estimates built from prices and reported trades. None of them is an on-chain settlement fact. Knowing how each is calculated keeps you from reading more into it than it holds.

Key takeaways

• Market cap is circulating supply multiplied by the last price. It ranks assets by size; it is not cash invested.
• Volume is reported 24-hour turnover. It varies by venue and can be inflated.
• Dominance is one asset’s share of total crypto market cap, so it moves when either side changes.
• The heatmap and rankings describe size and change. They are not recommendations.

Market cap

Market cap multiplies the provider’s circulating supply by the last price. It is useful for ranking and for comparing assets with very different unit prices. It is not a pile of money: because every token is marked at the latest price, market cap can rise or fall sharply on relatively little trading.

Stablecoins are a special case. Their price is designed to stay near $1, so their market cap changes mainly when the issuer creates or redeems tokens. A rising stablecoin market cap reflects issuance, not price gains.

Volume

Volume is the value traded over the past 24 hours, as reported by the venues a provider tracks. Venues report differently, and some have been found to inflate their figures. Volume can exceed market cap because the same tokens can trade many times in a day. A high ratio of volume to market cap shows active turnover. On its own, it does not show how deep the market is or how genuine the activity is.

Dominance

Dominance is an asset’s market cap as a share of the total crypto market cap reported by CoinGecko. Bitcoin dominance is the figure most often quoted. Because it is a ratio, it can rise when bitcoin gains or when other assets fall faster than bitcoin. The stacked bar on the homepage shows the shares, not the reason they moved.

Stablecoin dominance works the same way. A higher stablecoin share can mean new stablecoins were issued, or that the rest of the market fell while stablecoin supply held steady.

Worked example

Imagine a total crypto market cap of $1,000 billion, with bitcoin at $550 billion. Bitcoin dominance is 55%. Now everything else falls by 10% while bitcoin is flat. The rest of the market drops from $450 billion to $405 billion, the total becomes $955 billion, and bitcoin dominance rises to about 57.6%. Bitcoin’s price did not move; its share did. These are invented figures.

Reading the heatmap

The heatmap sizes each cell by market cap and colors it by 24-hour percentage change. A large green cell is a large asset that rose over the period. A blank cell means the data was missing, not that the price was flat. Like the rankings, the heatmap describes the market. It does not recommend anything.