Why the price per coin tells you nothing
A coin at 0.10 dollars is not cheap and a coin at 1,000 dollars is not expensive. The unit price is the result of an arbitrary choice: how many pieces the project decided to cut its supply into. A token with 50 billion units at 0.10 dollars is worth 5 billion in total. A token with one million units at 1,000 dollars is worth one billion. The first is five times larger than the second, even though its price has three zeros fewer.
This is the first thing to unlearn when reading a coin page, and the reason market capitalisation exists: it multiplies price by the number of coins, so you compare whole projects instead of arbitrary slices. Everything else in this guide builds on that one multiplication, and on the question that hides inside it: which number of coins?
Market cap: price times circulating supply
Market cap = current price × circulating supply. Circulating supply is the number of coins that exist and are freely tradeable right now. For Bitcoin in September 2026 that is about 20.09 million BTC of a maximum of 21 million, so 95.7 percent of all bitcoin that will ever exist is already out. The Bitcoin page shows this as a supply bar; for Bitcoin the bar is almost full.
Two things market cap does not tell you. It is not the money that went into a coin: if one person buys one coin at a new high, the market cap of every other coin jumps too, though no money changed hands for them. And it is not what you could sell the whole supply for: markets are thin, and dumping even a percent of most tokens would move the price. Market cap is a snapshot of how the market prices the existing coins at the margin. That is useful for comparing size and nothing more.
Size does carry information, though. Coins above 10 billion dollars in market cap tend to move less violently than coins below 100 million, because it takes more capital to shift them. That is why CoinVett's altcoin guide and the risk labels on coin pages treat small caps as a category of their own.
Circulating, total and max supply
The supply number in the market cap formula is one of three, and mixing them up is the most common mistake in the whole subject.
| Supply type | What it counts | Bitcoin | Ethereum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circulating | Coins that exist and are freely tradeable today | ~20.09 million | ~120.7 million |
| Total | All coins created so far, minus burned ones; includes locked and vested tokens | ~20.09 million (same: nothing is locked at protocol level) | ~120.7 million |
| Max | The hard cap coded into the protocol, if there is one | 21 million | None |
For Bitcoin all three are close together, which is exactly what makes its supply so legible. For most newer tokens they are far apart: a project might have a max supply of 10 billion, a total supply of 10 billion already minted into contracts, and a circulating supply of 1.5 billion because the rest sits in vesting schedules for the team, investors and the treasury. That gap is where the next concept lives.
One warning about the circulating figure: it is partly a judgement call. Data providers such as CoinGecko subtract tokens they consider locked, unvested or held in project treasuries; different providers apply different rules, and the project itself reports what it considers circulating. Two websites can show two market caps for the same coin on the same day. Neither is lying; they disagree about what "circulating" means.
FDV: what the coin would be worth if every token existed
Fully diluted valuation (FDV) = current price × total or max supply. It answers a hypothetical: if every token that will ever exist were in circulation today, at today's price, what would the whole thing be worth? For Bitcoin, FDV is barely above market cap (21 versus 20.09 million). For a token with 15 percent of its supply circulating, FDV is nearly seven times market cap.
The gap between the two numbers is the overhang: tokens that do not trade yet but will. Every one of them, when unlocked, is a potential seller. The FDV does not predict that the price will fall by that ratio, because demand can grow too. It tells you how much new supply has to be absorbed to keep the price where it is. That is a description of the supply side, and it is the single most useful number on a coin page that most beginners never look at.
The low float, high FDV pattern
In 2024 this pattern became the defining complaint about new token launches. Binance Research looked at tokens launched that year and found an average market cap to FDV ratio of 12.3 percent, with several prominent launches circulating as little as 6 percent of their supply at listing. The same report estimated that roughly 155 billion dollars' worth of tokens were scheduled to unlock between 2024 and 2030. A token that launches with a small float and a headline FDV in the billions has priced in a lot of demand that has not shown up yet, and the holders of the locked 88 percent are typically insiders who bought far below the listing price. That is not a prediction about any particular token. It is a structural reason why the circulating and total supply fields are worth reading before the price chart.
| Example (illustrative) | Price | Circulating | Max | Market cap | FDV | Float |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Established coin | 2.00 $ | 900 million | 1 billion | 1.8 billion $ | 2.0 billion $ | 90 % |
| New launch | 2.00 $ | 120 million | 1 billion | 240 million $ | 2.0 billion $ | 12 % |
Same price, same FDV, same max supply. One has 100 million tokens still to come; the other has 880 million. Reading only the price, they look identical.
Tokenomics: the questions behind the numbers
Tokenomics is the set of rules that decide how many tokens exist, who gets them, when, and why anyone would want them. The supply figures above are the output of those rules. Five questions cover most of it.
Is there a cap, and if not, how fast does supply grow?
Bitcoin's 21 million is the reference case: fixed, enforced by code, with issuance halving every four years (the halving guide explains the schedule). Dogecoin is the opposite: no cap, about 5 billion new coins a year forever, which on a base of roughly 150 billion is a little over 3 percent annual inflation and slowly falling. Ethereum has no cap either, but since 2021 it burns part of every transaction fee; whether its supply grows or shrinks in a given month depends on how busy the network is, and since the 2022 switch to Proof of Stake it has stayed within a narrow band around 120 million. None of these designs is right or wrong. They are different, and a holder should know which one they are holding.
Who got the tokens, and at what price?
The allocation table in a project's documentation shows the split between team, early investors, foundation or treasury, ecosystem incentives and public sale or airdrop. A team-plus-investor share above 40 percent is common in venture-backed projects; it means nearly half the eventual supply belongs to people who paid a fraction of the public price. That is not a scandal. It is how the project was funded. But it tells you who the future sellers are.
When do locked tokens unlock?
Vesting schedules release locked tokens over time, typically with a cliff (nothing for six to twelve months) and then monthly or linear release over two to four years. The unlock calendar is public for most projects and is the mechanism that turns FDV into market cap month by month. Large unlocks are dates worth knowing about; what the market does on those dates varies, and this guide does not attempt to say. Token unlocks deserve their own guide and will get one.
What creates demand for the token?
Supply is half the equation. The other half is why anyone needs the token: to pay for gas on the chain (ETH, SOL), to stake and secure the network, to vote in governance, to receive a share of protocol fees, or to access a product. A token with no role beyond "you can trade it" has only speculative demand. That is a description, not a judgement; plenty of coins with no utility have large market caps. But it is the answer to "what happens to demand when the incentives stop".
Are tokens being removed?
Some protocols destroy tokens: Ethereum burns the base fee of every transaction; BNB runs quarterly burns towards a target of halving its initial 200 million supply. Burns reduce total supply and are the mirror image of issuance. They are only meaningful relative to the issuance on the other side, and a "deflationary" label in a whitepaper is worth exactly as much as the on-chain data that backs it.
What-if scenarios: use them for scale, not for targets
A popular exercise: "what would coin A be worth if it had the market cap of coin B?" The CoinVett market cap calculator does this calculation for any two coins. Divide the target market cap by coin A's circulating supply and you get the hypothetical price. It is a useful reality check in one direction: if the answer requires a small token to become larger than Ethereum, you have learned something about the claim you were evaluating. It is not useful as a target, because the calculation holds coin A's supply constant, ignores every unlock, and says nothing about whether the demand exists. Treat the output as a unit conversion, not a forecast. The compare tool puts up to three coins' actual prices and market caps side by side; for the supply figures, open each coin's page.
Reading a coin page in sixty seconds
- Market cap and rank: how big is this, relative to what you know?
- Circulating versus max supply: how full is the supply bar? Under 30 percent means most of the supply is still to come.
- Is there a max at all? If not, find the issuance rate.
- FDV versus market cap: how large is the overhang?
- Where are the locked tokens? Team, investors, treasury, and on what schedule.
Five questions, none of them about price. If a coin's documentation cannot answer them, that is itself an answer.
Frequently asked questions
Is a coin with a low price per unit a bargain?
No. The unit price reflects how many pieces the supply is divided into, not the size or value of the project. Compare market caps, and then compare FDVs, to see how two coins actually relate.
Is a large gap between market cap and FDV bad?
It describes a large amount of supply still to come, which future demand has to absorb. Whether that is a problem depends on the unlock schedule, who holds the locked tokens and whether the project generates demand. The gap is a fact about supply; what the price does with it is not something this metric predicts.
Why do different websites show different market caps for the same coin?
Because they count circulating supply differently. One provider may exclude a treasury wallet another includes; the project may report a figure a provider does not accept. Check the supply number first when two market caps disagree.
Where do I find FDV on CoinVett?
Coin pages show circulating supply, max supply and a supply bar; multiply price by max supply to get FDV where a max exists. The market cap calculator works with circulating figures; the compare tool shows market cap, not supply. For coins without a max supply, FDV is not a well-defined number, and any site showing one is using total supply instead.
Notice: Market cap, FDV and supply figures describe how a coin is structured and priced. They do not indicate whether any coin is fairly priced, and nothing on this page is investment advice.