What's the difference between market cap and FDV in crypto?

In crypto, market cap is a coin's price multiplied by the coins already in circulation. FDV, short for fully diluted valuation, multiplies the same price by every coin that will ever exist. The gap between the two is the supply still to come, and that gap is the reason to look at both numbers side by side.

How market cap and FDV are calculated

Both numbers start from the same price. Only the count of coins changes:

• Market cap = price × circulating supply. Circulating supply is the coins that are out in the open and can be bought and sold today.
• FDV = price × max supply. Max supply is the largest number of coins the coin's rules allow to exist, ever.

Take a made-up coin trading at $2. There are 100 million of its coins in circulation, and its rules allow 1 billion in total. Its market cap is $200 million. Its FDV is $2 billion, ten times as much, because 900 million coins are still locked away or not yet created.

Bitcoin sits at the other end of the scale. Its rules cap the supply at 21 million coins, and since March 2026 more than 20 million of them have been mined. So Bitcoin's market cap and FDV are within about 5% of each other: almost every bitcoin that will ever exist already does.

The word "diluted" comes from company shares. When a company issues new shares, each old share owns a smaller slice of the business. New coins do the same to people who already hold a coin, and FDV shows the coin's value as if all that dilution had already happened, at today's price.

Price trackers don't all compute FDV the same way. For one coin you can meet three versions:

• Price × max supply. The textbook formula above.
• Price × total supply. Total supply is the coins created so far, a figure explained in the next section.
• No FDV at all. Some sites show no FDV for a coin that has no max supply, because there is no final number of coins to multiply by.

When two trackers show different FDVs for the same coin, look first at which supply each of them multiplied by.

Circulating supply, total supply and max supply: what each one counts

A coin's page on a price tracker usually shows three supply figures. Each one answers its own question:

• Circulating supply: what can be traded now. These are the coins held by the public and sitting on exchanges.
• Total supply: what exists now. Every coin created so far, minus coins that were burned, meaning sent to an address nobody can spend from. Total supply includes coins that exist but are locked, for example coins set aside for the team, early investors or the project's treasury.
• Max supply: what can ever exist. The hard limit written into the coin's rules. Some coins have no such limit: Ethereum keeps issuing new ether to the validators who keep the network running.

Between the three figures sit two gaps:

• Circulating to total supply: coins held back. They exist, but their owners can't sell them yet.
• Total to max supply: coins not created yet. They will appear later, for example as rewards to miners or validators.

FDV covers both gaps at once, which is why it is never smaller than market cap.

Where do these counts come from? For a coin like Bitcoin, anyone can add them up: every coin is recorded on the blockchain, a public ledger that thousands of computers keep identical copies of, and that ledger is the core idea behind how cryptocurrency and blockchain work.

Circulating supply is harder to pin down for newer coins. The ledger shows how many coins each address holds, but not always which addresses belong to a team that has promised not to sell. Trackers partly rely on what the project itself reports, which is another reason two sites can disagree about the same coin.

What FDV in crypto shows, and where it misleads

FDV answers one question: what would all the coins be worth if every one of them were trading at today's price? That makes it useful for comparing a young coin with an old one. By market cap, a new coin with most of its supply locked can look small. FDV shows the size it is already priced at once all of its coins are out.

The catch is the assumption inside the number. Locked coins reach the market over months or years, and the price on the day they unlock is whatever buyers will pay for the extra coins then. FDV is not a forecast. It is today's price applied to tomorrow's supply.

For a coin with no max supply, FDV has nothing fixed to multiply by. There the more useful figure is the issuance rate, meaning how many new coins appear each year. The project's own documentation states it, and supply charts on trackers show how it has played out so far.

What low float and high FDV mean together

Float is the share of a coin's total supply that is actually trading. Low float with a high FDV means a small slice of the coins sets the price for a very large total, and most of the supply is still waiting to come out.

The pattern drew enough attention that in May 2024 Binance Research published a report on it. The report estimated that tokens worth about $155 billion would unlock between 2024 and 2030.

Here is why the combination matters. Each unlock adds coins that their owners can sell. Early investors buy in private rounds, before the coin trades anywhere. If they paid less than today's price, selling at the unlock already makes them money.

Back to the made-up coin: 100 million coins are circulating, and next quarter another 50 million unlock. Circulating supply jumps by half overnight. At $2 a coin, that is $100 million worth of new coins, and for the price to stay at $2 the market has to find buyers for all of them.

If a coin you are looking at has a low float and a high FDV, three things say more than the ratio itself:

• Who holds the locked coins. Coins for the team and investors can be sold once they unlock. Coins in a treasury or a community fund come out as the project spends them or pays rewards.
• When the coins unlock. Vesting is the schedule that releases locked coins in portions. A cliff is the waiting period before the first release, and on the cliff date a whole block of coins can unlock at once instead of a steady trickle.
• How big each unlock is next to circulating supply. An unlock of 5% of circulating supply is a small addition. An unlock of 50% grows circulating supply by half in a single day.

Not every coin that enters circulation comes from insiders. Some reach users through an airdrop, when the project hands out tokens for free, often as a reward for early activity. The airdropped coins join circulating supply on the day recipients can claim them, just like an unlock, so it helps to understand what a crypto airdrop is and how it works.

Why market cap isn't the money invested in a coin

A $200 million market cap does not mean anyone put $200 million into the coin. It is the price of the last trade multiplied by every circulating coin. If the last trade was at $2, every coin counts as $2, even though selling them all at once would push the price far lower.

Picture the extreme case. A coin has 1 billion coins in circulation, and someone buys 100 of them at $1 each. On paper the coin now has a market cap of $1 billion, built on a $100 trade. The case is extreme on purpose, but the effect works the same way in smaller doses: the thinner the trading, the less market cap says about what the coins could actually be sold for.

Stablecoins are the case where market cap means something simpler. A stablecoin such as USDT or USDC is built to hold $1, so its market cap is roughly the number of tokens issued, in other words how much of it people hold. That number grows when the issuer creates new tokens and shrinks when holders hand tokens back for dollars.

A stablecoin's market cap starts behaving like a regular coin's only when its price slips below $1. Holders who can redeem then hand their tokens back for dollars, and price and supply fall at the same time. That is the moment covered in what a stablecoin depeg is and what a business should do about it.

How market cap differs from trading volume

Trading volume is the dollar value of a coin that changed hands over the last 24 hours, added up across exchanges. Market cap tells you how big a coin is on paper. Volume tells you how much of it is actually being bought and sold, which means how easy it is to trade without moving the price.

Take two coins with the same $500 million market cap. The first trades $100 million a day, the second trades $1 million a day. Selling $5 million of the first is a small share of one day's trading. Selling $5 million of the second equals five full days of everyone's trading, and the price would drop long before the sale was done.

Volume has its own weak spot. Some exchanges report trades that are partly fake, known as wash trading: a trader buys from themselves to make a market look busy. A high volume figure spread across several large exchanges therefore tells you more than the same figure coming mostly from one small exchange.

The short version

Market cap prices the coins that are out today. FDV prices the coins that will ever exist, at today's price. The distance between the two is supply still to come, and the unlock schedule behind that distance tells you more than either number alone. Volume, finally, shows whether the market for a coin is deep enough for its market cap to mean much.

Questions people ask next

Is there a good ratio between market cap and FDV?

There is no universal number, but the ratio reads plainly. Close to 1, as with Bitcoin at above 0.95, means almost no new supply is ahead. Around 0.5 means half the coins are still to come, and below about 0.2 means most of the supply is still locked or unissued, so the unlock schedule matters more than today's price.

So what does market cap actually tell me?

Market cap is good for comparing the size of coins with each other, and price trackers rank coins by it. It does not tell you where the price is going or how much money has gone in. For a business choosing which coins to take from customers, market cap is the wrong yardstick: what matters there is which coins customers already hold and what each network charges per transfer, which is how the top coins for accepting crypto payments are picked.

What does "the crypto market cap" mean when the news quotes one number for all of crypto?

It is the sum of the market caps of every coin a tracker follows. Trackers follow different lists of coins, so their totals differ slightly. Because the total is built from market caps, it inherits their weak spot: a share of it is coins that trade rarely and could not be sold at the listed price.

This article explains how these numbers are calculated and what they show; it is not investment advice.