Fully-diluted valuation (FDV)

Price times which supply, exactly

The arithmetic is one multiplication. The argument is entirely about the second term. Token Terminal publishes its formula in the open: fully diluted market capitalization is maximum supply multiplied by token price, with the inputs sourced from CoinGecko.¹ That is the version most people repeat.

CoinGecko's own API does not always compute it that way. Read on 3 August 2026, its BNB record carried a max supply of 200,000,000 and a total supply of 133,164,946.5, and its fully diluted valuation field returned $78,789,462,480, which sits within about nine thousand dollars of the market cap it reported in the same payload. That is total supply times price. At the implied price of roughly $591.67 per token, the max supply version of the same calculation would have printed near $118 billion.²

So the practical rule is not a formula, it is a question. When someone quotes you an FDV, ask which supply number produced it. On BNB that single choice moved the answer by about $39 billion, and neither provider was doing anything wrong by its own published definition. Read every FDV you did not compute yourself as a point-in-time output of somebody else's methodology.

Where FDV and market cap come apart

Market cap counts what is tradeable now. FDV counts what will exist eventually. The ratio between them is float, and at launch float is usually small by design, because vesting contracts hold the team, investor and ecosystem allocations for years.

Wormhole's debut is the cleanest documented version. On 3 April 2024 the W token opened at $1.66 on OpenBook with a market capitalization of $2.98 billion and a fully diluted value of $16.5 billion, both figures attributed to CoinGecko. The airdrop released 617 million tokens, described as 6% of the total supply.³ Divide the two headline numbers and the traded portion was about 18% of the fully diluted count, so roughly five and a half times the day-one market value was still locked, unissued or held back.

That gap is not a scandal on its own. It is a schedule. What matters is whether the schedule and the business are on the same timeline, and that is a question about revenue and users, not about the token contract.

What low float against high FDV actually commits a project to

Binance Research put numbers on the 2024 cohort. Tokens launched that year carried a market cap to FDV ratio of 12.3%, the lowest of the previous three years, and the report's sample showed circulating supplies as low as 6% with none exceeding 20% as of 14 May 2024. It estimated roughly $155 billion of tokens scheduled to unlock between 2024 and 2030.⁴

The most useful line in that report is its own arithmetic on the consequence: for those tokens to hold their prices as the locked supply arrives, approximately $80 billion of demand-side liquidity would need to flow into them.⁴ That is a stated capital requirement, not a forecast about any token. It is the thing a founder should be modelling quarter by quarter against their own unlock table.

In our view this is where the design conversation belongs. A high FDV is a promise that the business will be worth carrying a much larger supply later. If nobody has written down where that demand comes from, the FDV is a number describing another number.

Ethena from 5% float to 63.7%, twenty eight months apart

Ethena's ENA listed on 2 April 2024. The airdrop released 750 million tokens, described as 5% of the total supply, and the token traded around 64 cents with a market cap close to $500 million.⁵ Those two facts fix the total supply at 15 billion, so the same 64 cent price implied a fully diluted figure near $9.6 billion against a market cap near $500 million. That is our arithmetic on their reported figures, and it puts the day-one gap at roughly nineteen times.

Read the same token on 3 August 2026 and the picture has resolved. CoinGecko reported circulating supply of 9,560,937,500 against total and max supply of 15,000,000,000, a float of 63.74%, with a market cap of $880,036,871 and an FDV of $1,380,675,594.² The gap is now about 1.57 times. The implied token price on that read is roughly nine cents.

The dilution did not disappear. It was delivered, on schedule, over twenty eight months, and the two figures converged the way they always eventually do. One token is an anecdote rather than evidence, and these are point-in-time reads that will be different numbers next week. What the example does show cleanly is the mechanism: FDV and market cap converge as float grows, and the path between them is where a treasury either holds or does not.

None of the above is a comment on whether any of it was priced correctly at any point. That is not a call this page makes.

Both slogans in the FDV debate are wrong

One camp treats low float as evidence of a scam. It is not. A project holding 90% of supply for contributors, ecosystem growth and a treasury that has to survive five years is doing something ordinary, and shipping most of the supply on day one has its own well documented failure mode.

The other camp treats a high FDV as automatic overvaluation. That is also lazy. FDV is a large number because the denominator is large. A token with a 100 billion supply will have a big FDV at any price, and comparing raw FDVs across tokens with different supply conventions tells you almost nothing.

The question that survives both slogans is what the locked supply is for. Supply reserved for a contributor team that is building revenue is a different instrument from supply reserved for an ecosystem fund with no named use. Write the answer down before the raise, because you will be asked it during one.

How FDV gets misused inside a raise

The most common failure we see is an FDV accepted as a valuation anchor without anyone checking the supply term. A founder agrees to a round priced at a given FDV, the token later lists with a supply figure the investors and the data providers each read differently, and the reported valuation on day one does not match the number in the SAFT.

The second failure is comparable sets built from mixed methodologies. If three of your comparables have FDVs computed on max supply and two on total supply, the average is not a benchmark, it is a mixture of two different metrics. Recompute the set yourself from supply figures you can verify onchain before you put it in a deck.

Both failures are cheap to prevent and expensive to discover after the token generation event, which is why we treat the supply definition as a term sheet item rather than a data question.

What we settle before the token has a price

Four things, written down, before FDV is quoted to anyone. Which supply figure your FDV uses, stated in the tokenomics document so that every provider and every investor computes the same number. The unlock schedule with dates and amounts, published rather than described. The float curve quarter by quarter, not just the launch float and the endpoint. And the demand required per quarter to absorb each tranche, expressed in dollars, next to what the business is actually expected to produce.

That fourth item is the one that gets skipped, and it is the only one that connects the token to the company. Everything else is bookkeeping. The token is infrastructure for the business, and FDV is the size of the bill the business has agreed to grow into.