Market capitalization

Why circulating supply is the denominator

The choice is deliberate and it is documented. CoinMarketCap's own glossary states that circulating supply rather than total supply is used to calculate market capitalization, because prices are normally affected by the coins and tokens that can be used rather than those that are inaccessible.¹ Tokens locked in a vesting contract cannot be sold, so pricing them at the market price would report a number no seller could realise.

That reasoning is sound and it creates the problem this page is about. Deciding which tokens are inaccessible is a judgement, not a measurement. A foundation wallet with no lock contract, a team allocation that is technically transferable but contractually restricted, a bridge escrow, tokens on a chain the indexer does not read: each of those is a call someone has to make, and different providers make them differently.

So a token market cap is a price everyone can verify multiplied by a supply figure that is an estimate. The uncertainty lives entirely in the second term.

The price half is the easy half

Reading Ethena from both major providers within minutes of each other on 3 August 2026, the market caps were $880,036,871 at CoinGecko and $880.15 million at CoinMarketCap, a difference of around one hundredth of a percent.³ On the same pair of reads their TVL figures were about 6% apart. Price aggregation across venues is largely a solved engineering problem. Supply accounting is not.

CoinMarketCap makes the point against itself by publishing two market caps for the same token on the same page. Its Ethena page showed a market cap of $880.15 million and an unlocked market cap of $888.93 million on 3 August 2026, roughly $8.8 million apart, because the two figures use different supply denominators.⁴ One provider, one token, one moment, two answers, and both are labelled market cap.

For a founder that is the actionable part. You cannot influence how exchanges aggregate your price, but you can remove every ambiguity from your supply accounting, and doing so is the difference between one reported market cap and several.

BNB and ENA: the same metric carrying different amounts of information

On 3 August 2026 CoinGecko reported BNB with a circulating supply of 133,164,946.5 against a total supply of the same figure, a market cap of $78,789,471,592 and a fully diluted valuation of $78,789,462,480.² Circulating supply is total supply, so market cap and FDV are the same number and the market cap tells you everything the metric can tell you.

The same read on Ethena showed 9,560,937,500 circulating against 15,000,000,000 total, a market cap of $880,036,871 and an FDV of $1,380,675,594.² The market cap covers 63.7% of the eventual supply. The remaining 36.3% is real, scheduled and outside the figure.

Quoting those two market caps side by side without the float attached is how comparison tables mislead people. One is a complete valuation of the circulating asset. The other is a partial one that will be diluted on a published timetable.

What a token market cap cannot tell you

It is not capital raised or capital invested. A token that trades $2 million of volume on the way to a $500 million market cap did not absorb $500 million of buying; it repriced a large existing supply against a thin order book.

It is not exit liquidity either. Market cap assumes the marginal price applies to every unit, which is exactly what fails when a large holder sells. The number that governs what can actually be sold is order book depth, which is a separate measurement and usually a much smaller one.

And it says nothing about the business. Market cap has no revenue term, no user term and no cost term in it. Two protocols with identical market caps can have wildly different fee income, and the metric will not distinguish them. That is why we read it alongside protocol revenue rather than on its own.

The rising market cap that is not demand

Market cap has two inputs and both move. When circulating supply rises through an unlock while price stays flat, market cap rises. Nothing about that increase reflects new demand, but it will read as growth on a chart and in a monthly investor update.

The inverse is the trap that catches teams during vesting. Price can fall while market cap holds steady, because new supply is entering circulation at roughly the rate the price declines. A founder tracking market cap alone sees a flat line and concludes the token is stable. A founder tracking price and float separately sees what is actually happening.

Across the projects we have advised, this is the single most common reporting error in a token dashboard: one market cap number with no float series next to it. Plot circulating supply on the same chart and the story reads correctly with no further commentary needed.

How we read it in an audit

Three figures together, never one alone. Market cap for what is priced today, FDV for the supply obligation still outstanding, and the float percentage that connects them. Any two of those three imply the third, and a founder who can recite all three about their own token has usually done the rest of the work too.

Then one question that market cap cannot answer and every board eventually asks: what does the protocol earn, and what share of that reaches the token. The market cap is downstream of that answer. It is never a substitute for it.