Market Cap Calculator

Someone shilled you a token by saying "it's only at 50 million market cap, easy 10x." You want to check what that 10x actually implies — what valuation it puts the project at, how it compares to the next-tier projects, and whether the math sounds reasonable when you say the result out loud.

Multiply circulating supply by current price and you've got market cap. Multiply your target price by the same supply and you've got the valuation that target implies. The interesting part is the comparison: a token going from $50M to $500M needs to absorb buying pressure equivalent to flipping a mid-sized DeFi protocol, and saying it that way usually changes how you think about the trade.

The formula is simple: market cap = circulating supply × current price. Fully diluted valuation (FDV) substitutes the max or total supply for circulating. The difference between the two tells you how much future dilution is baked in. A project with $50M market cap but $500M FDV has 90% of its supply still locked up in team allocations, treasury, or scheduled emissions — those tokens will eventually hit the market and depress price unless demand grows proportionally. Bitcoin is unusual: about 95% of its supply is already in circulation, so market cap and FDV are nearly identical. Most newer tokens have FDV-to-market-cap ratios of 3-10x at launch.

A worked example: a token trades at $0.05 with 200 million tokens circulating. Market cap = 0.05 × 200,000,000 = $10 million. Max supply is 1 billion. FDV = 0.05 × 1,000,000,000 = $50 million. If someone targets $0.50 (10x) on the price, the implied market cap at that price is $100 million on circulating supply. But by the time price hits $0.50, suppose 400 million tokens are circulating — actual market cap at the target is $200 million, and FDV is $500 million. The 10x in price doesn't equal a 10x in valuation if dilution is happening during the move.

Where market cap as a metric breaks down: thin liquidity makes it nearly meaningless. A token with $1 billion market cap and $100,000 in 24-hour volume can be moved 50% with a $500,000 sell order — the cap reflects the last trade price, not the price at which you could actually sell the supply. Compare market cap to daily volume; ratios above 100:1 suggest the cap is theoretical. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap both have data quality issues with smaller tokens (especially around what counts as "circulating"), so cross-check the supply number against the project's docs or block explorer before relying on the calculation for anything important.