Fully-diluted valuation (FDV) is token price multiplied by max or total supply: the market cap a project would carry if every token were already circulating. It is the honest sticker price because it counts supply still locked in vesting and future emissions, not just today's float.
A large gap between FDV and circulating market cap is not automatically bad, but it is a quantified dilution obligation the project has to grow into, unlock by unlock.
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How it is calculated
Take the last traded price and multiply it by max supply, or by total supply if no hard cap is defined. The calculation itself is trivial. The analysis lives in the comparison to circulating market cap.
A project at a $50M circulating market cap but a $500M FDV has 90% of its supply still in the pipeline. The current price only holds if the market will absorb roughly ten times the present float at today's valuation or higher.
Design consequence
Every unlock event becomes a test: can demand absorb new supply at current prices? Projects that launch on a compressed float with an enormous FDV are betting that protocol growth outpaces supply release.
Plenty lost that bet publicly across the 2021 to 2024 cycle, with tokens shedding 70 to 90% from TGE highs as vesting cliffs landed into thin demand.
Common mistake
Presenting circulating market cap alone in investor materials. Sophisticated buyers compute FDV in seconds, so burying it signals either naivety or an intent to obscure.
We present FDV next to circulating market cap in every valuation table and flag any FDV-to-circulating ratio that is not backed by a defensible growth thesis across the full vesting horizon.
See Tokenomics Audit for how this applies in practice.
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