How to read the crypto market
Every site shows price, market cap and volume. All three look like they tell you the size of the thing, and none of them does. This lesson is about reading the right number.
Renato UlianovOpening · 16 s · in Portuguese
Blurred on purpose. Five words, and the first is the most expensive in the market.
Market cap is not money that went in
When a site says a coin “is worth two billion”, almost everyone hears: two billion went into it. It did not. Market cap is a multiplication: the price of the last trade times the number of coins that exist.
Notice what that sum does not ask. It does not ask how much was traded. It does not ask whether anyone could sell it. It does not ask whether there is a buyer for the second coin, let alone the millionth. It takes one price and extends it to everything.
When the order book is shallow the result is absurd — and it is arithmetic, not opinion. Move the slider and see the two numbers side by side.
Movement is not interest
The second number is volume: how much was traded over a period. It looks like proof that people are there — and it is precisely because it looks like that that it is the easiest to manufacture.
Buying from yourself produces volume. Two of your own accounts trading with each other produce volume. A program doing that all day produces a lot of volume, and the cost is only the fee — which at an exchange that wants to appear in rankings can be zero.
This is not an accusation of anyone: it is the reason high volume on its own proves nothing. What helps is looking at where it comes from — spread across many venues and many hours, or concentrated in one.
Not everything that exists can be sold yet
The third number hides the most important thing. Almost every new project releases its coins gradually: a portion circulates today, and the rest arrives on agreed dates — founders, early investors, people who work there.
Two things follow. First: today's price forms on the small part that circulates. Second, and harder: whoever holds the rest did not pay that price, and one day will be able to sell. Step through the months and see how much is still coming.
The price on screen is the last trade
It is the same sentence as lesson 02 of the other track, and here it weighs more. The big number at the top of the page is not “the price”: it is the price at which the last exchange happened. It may have been one unit. It may have been hours ago.
The price you will get depends on how much is for sale near there — which is what liquidity means. In a deep book, buying barely moves anything. In a thin book, your own order is what makes the price, and so is the order of whoever sells after you.
Now read the sentence
It's the same one from the top, unblurred. Tap each highlighted part.
Five words
Two are arithmetic, two are conditions, and one is what you actually see. Tap one.
Five taps and the sentence is done.
If this landed, the lesson did what it promised
- Market cap is price times supply — not money that went in.
- High volume alone proves no interest: it can be manufactured.
- Part of the supply may be locked, and it is still coming.
- The big number is the last trade, not the price you will get.
Renato UlianovClosing · 39 s · in Portuguese
Educational material. The numbers in the figures are abstract and illustrative: this page quotes no price and names no real project, token or exchange, and assesses none. Nothing here is investment advice.