Circulating supply

Market cap is the number every price page prints second, and it is a product of two factors. The price is contested at the margin. The supply is where the large disagreements live, and the word doing the work is "circulating".

How it works

A ledger knows balances and nothing else. It can say how many units exist and which addresses hold them. It cannot say which of those addresses belong to a founder, a treasury, a market maker on loan or a buyback programme. Circulating supply is what is left after somebody answers those questions, and the answer is a policy.

CoinMarketCap's supply page opens by calling market cap "a polysemous term" and then lists four versions, from largest to smallest: fully diluted valuation on maximum supply, minted market cap on total supply net of burns, unlocked market cap on unlocked supply, and circulating market cap on public float. It ranks by the last one. The distinctions it draws are the useful part:

• Circulating is not unlocked. Tokens a project has bought back on the open market are unlocked and, by CoinMarketCap's reading of industry consensus, not circulating. Unlocked supply is derived from a token release schedule; circulating supply subtracts insider wallets from total supply.
• Distribution does not settle it. Private-sale allocations, treasuries, escrows and ecosystem or marketing pools are generally excluded. Airdropped tokens are excluded too unless the project shows there was real demand, such as users registering for the drop. Staked supply is decided case by case.
• A verified figure has a bar. The asset needs material trading on at least three exchanges CoinMarketCap tracks, and a team that cannot document its allocations gets no verified figure at all. Since the self-reporting dashboard, a project's own number can appear on its page beside the verified one, "without any ranking implications".

Coin Metrics draws the line somewhere else. Its free float supply removes units held by insiders, controlling investors and long-term strategic holders, and also units "inactive for greater than five years" and those burnt or lost. Dormancy on its own is a criterion there. CoinMarketCap's exclusions turn on who holds the coins, and where its page talks about wallets untouched for years it means a founding team's. Coin Metrics notes that its figure constantly comes out lower than both the supply foundations report and the total visible on-chain.

Why it matters here

A market cap column is only as comparable as its supply rule. A table that ranks tokens from two vendors, or sets one vendor's circulating figure against another's fully diluted one, is ranking policies. Pick the vendor first and the definition second, and keep both fixed across the whole table. Reconciling a token's supply and market cap walks through the five published rulebooks side by side; this page does not repeat it.

A missing figure is an answer. CoinMarketCap withholds a verified circulating supply when a team cannot document its allocations, and with it the market cap it ranks by. That blank says the vendor could not check the number. Backfilling it from the project's own site replaces a checked absence with an unchecked claim.

Self-reported numbers travel. DEX Screener's card records that its market cap falls back to a circulating supply the project submits through paid Enhanced Token Info, or to CoinGecko's figure. A pair page on a screener can therefore show a market cap resting on the issuer's word, formatted exactly like one resting on a vendor's verification. On 19 September 2026 DEXTools printed two different circulating supplies for its own token, 85,544,654 on the front page and 69,344,654 on the token page, against one total supply. A token threshold is not a price explains why that matters to anyone asked to hold the token rather than pay for the product.

The figure is a time series, and it gets revised. Circulating supply moves every time an unlock lands, a treasury sells or a buyback settles, so a market cap from last March should be priced against last March's supply, not today's. And the history itself is not fixed: Glassnode's card records circulating supply among the metrics recomputed after a methodology change, which is why its point-in-time metric set exists. A chart of market cap drawn across a recomputation is two definitions joined at the seam.

Dormant coins split the definitions widest. A chain with large balances untouched for years — early mining rewards, lost keys — scores very differently under a rule that counts dormancy and one that does not. Coin Metrics excludes coins inactive for five years from free float; a vendor that only subtracts insiders and locks counts them. For old proof-of-work coins that gap is structural and will not close with better data.