How to read a crypto market table
Price is only one column. Supply, volume and market value provide the rest of the context.
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What you’ll learn
- Read each column of a market table
- Explain why unit price says little about size
- Tell trading volume from liquidity
- Compare circulating, total and maximum supply
A crypto market table packs a lot into one row: price, change, market cap, volume and supply. Each column answers a different question, and each comes from a data provider with its own methods. Read the columns together, with their timestamps, before drawing a conclusion.
Key takeaways
- Market cap is price multiplied by circulating supply. It is a valuation, not the money invested.
- A low unit price does not make a token cheap. Supply determines what the price adds up to.
- Volume measures turnover. Liquidity measures how much you can trade without moving the price.
- Providers differ in how they aggregate prices and count supply, so the same asset can show different figures.
Price and market cap
Market capitalization is the current price multiplied by circulating supply. It is a convenient way to rank assets by size, but it measures an implied valuation, not the amount of money that has flowed in. Every token is marked at the latest price, so a modest amount of selling can move market cap by far more than the cash that changed hands.
Unit price alone tells you little. A token at $0.01 with 50 billion in circulation has a $500 million market cap. A token at $50 with 10 million in circulation has the same. Neither is cheaper because of its price per token.
Changes over time
The 24-hour change compares the latest price with a price observed about 24 hours earlier. Crypto trades around the clock, so there is no official daily open, and providers choose their own reference point and venues. Compare timestamps before treating a difference between two sites as an error.
Volume is not liquidity
Trading volume is the value traded over a period, usually 24 hours. Liquidity is how much you could buy or sell right now without moving the price much, which depends on order-book depth or pool size. A token can show high volume because the same coins changed hands many times, or because some venues report inflated figures. A high volume figure does not mean a large order will fill near the displayed price.
Supply matters
Circulating supply estimates the tokens available in the market. Total supply counts tokens that exist, including locked ones. Maximum supply is the hard limit, where one exists. Fully diluted valuation (FDV) multiplies the current price by the maximum or total supply. It shows what market cap would be if every token were circulating at today’s price. That makes it a way to see how much supply is still to come, not a forecast.
Read a row in order
- Confirm the asset: its name, its network and, for a token, its contract address.
- Check the data source and the update time.
- Read market cap and FDV together to see how much supply is not yet circulating.
- Compare volume with market cap, then check actual liquidity for the trade size you have in mind.
- Treat price change as context, not a signal.
Sources
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