Reading market information without fooling yourself

A price alone tells you almost nothing, because it depends on how many coins exist. Crypto from Zero lesson 4 showed a coin at $0.0004 that was forty times the size of one at $100.

Market value, price times coins in circulation, is the number to compare, and Researching a Crypto Project lesson 2 shows where the supply figures come from and how the fully diluted figure differs.

On 13 November 2026 the whole crypto market was worth about $2.3 trillion, and CoinGecko listed about 22,200 active coins and tokens. A token “up 300 percent” from a market value of $200,000 has moved less money than one large bitcoin trade. Read the size before the move.

In March 2019 the fund manager Bitwise, seeking approval for its own bitcoin ETF, showed the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) what lay under bitcoin’s volume on the listing sites: “Reported volume adds to roughly $6 billion/day”, but “approximately 95% of this volume is fake and/or non-economic in nature”. It had read trades from 81 exchanges, found that only ten had actual volume, and used Kaiko’s data for 4 to 8 March to put the real figure at $273 million a day.

Bitwise argued that the real market was “more orderly, and more regulated” than most people thought, which helped its own application, so apply this lesson’s test to it: ask what the writer earns.