Two browser tabs, same token, and the market cap is off by something like 15 percent between them. The price matches to the fourth decimal on both sites. Someone asked me how that is even possible, and the answer turns out to be one of the more useful things a beginner can learn about tokenomics, because the two sites agree on price and disagree on how many coins exist in a form that counts. Most of what matters in supply math hides inside that disagreement.
The three numbers, in plain terms
Max supply is the hard ceiling, the most coins that can ever exist under the protocol's rules. Bitcoin's 21 million is the famous example. Plenty of tokens have no max supply at all, Ethereum and Dogecoin among them, so the field on an aggregator shows an infinity symbol or just sits blank, and any percent-of-supply math needs a different denominator.
Total supply is what has been minted so far, minus whatever has been verifiably burned. It includes team allocations still under lock, treasury reserves, ecosystem funds, and tokens sitting in vesting contracts that cannot be sold yet. Those coins exist on-chain, but many of them cannot move.
Circulating supply is the judgment call. It is supposed to be the coins actually free to trade, meaning total supply minus everything locked, vested, or parked in project treasuries. And "supposed" is carrying real weight in that sentence, because unlike the other two figures, you cannot simply read circulating supply off the chain.
Where aggregators get each number
Max supply comes from the protocol rules or the token contract, and it is usually uncontroversial. Total supply is mostly mechanical too. For an ERC-20 you can call totalSupply() on the contract and subtract the balances in known burn addresses. Aggregators occasionally disagree about which burn addresses count, but those gaps tend to be small.
Circulating supply is where it gets messy. The major aggregators lean heavily on self-reported data. A project team submits a list of wallets it says are locked, along with vesting contracts, foundation reserves, and market-making allocations. The aggregator verifies what it can on-chain and subtracts those balances from total supply. Each site maintains its own wallet list, applies its own rules about what counts as locked, and refreshes on its own schedule. One might treat staked tokens as circulating while another does not. One might have processed the latest unlock while the other is still showing last quarter's figure. Market cap is just price multiplied by circulating supply, so two different circulating figures produce two different market caps, which is exactly what those side-by-side tabs were showing.
The honest way to hold this in your head is that circulating supply is an editorial opinion with a methodology behind it. When two sites disagree, neither is necessarily wrong. They are answering slightly different questions with slightly different wallet lists.
The ratio I compute before anything else
Divide circulating supply by max supply. If there is no max, use total supply and mentally note that even that ceiling can drift upward. This single division tells you how much of the token's eventual dilution has already happened.
Bitcoin scores well above 0.9 and has for years. Nearly every coin that will ever exist is already out there and already priced. Whatever else you believe about it, you are not going to get meaningfully diluted holding it.
Now take a hypothetical that matches a pattern I have seen play out dozens of times. A token launches with a max supply of one billion and a circulating supply of 120 million. That is a ratio of 0.12, which means roughly 88 percent of eventual supply has not touched the market yet. The price looks fine, the market cap looks small next to competitors, and the chart looks like a bargain. But if the vesting schedule runs four years, new coins will be arriving continuously for that entire stretch, and every one of them is a coin somebody is allowed to sell. For the price merely to stay flat, incoming buyers have to absorb something like an eightfold increase in tradable supply. That is years of guaranteed dilution, written into the project's own documents, and visible before you buy a single unit.
Fully diluted valuation captures the same idea from the other side. FDV is price multiplied by max supply instead of circulating supply. When the market cap reads 100 million and the FDV reads 800 million, the gap between them is the dilution overhang priced at today's level. Low-float, high-FDV launches were common in past cycles, and the typical aftermath was a long grind lower as each unlock added sell pressure that new demand could not soak up. A project can execute well the whole way down and still bleed, because the supply schedule does not care about execution.
A screening workflow that takes five minutes
Here is how I run it when a new token crosses my desk.
- Pull circulating, total, and max supply from two aggregators, not one. If the circulating figures differ by more than a few percent, find out why before trusting either number.
- Compute circulating divided by max. Above roughly 0.85, dilution is mostly behind you. Between 0.5 and 0.85, read the emission schedule, though it is usually manageable. Below 0.5, treat the vesting docs as required reading, and below 0.2, assume the chart will be fighting unlocks for years.
- Find the actual unlock calendar in the project docs or a token-unlock tracker. Cliff unlocks matter more than linear emissions because they land all at once and often get front-run.
- Check whether max supply is actually enforceable. Some contracts are mintable, and some caps can be raised by governance vote. A cap that can be voted higher is a soft cap wearing a hard cap's label.
- If the project advertises burns, confirm the burned tokens actually leave total supply in the data source you are using, rather than sitting in a wallet everyone politely agrees to ignore.
The failure mode this protects against is comparing market caps across tokens as if they were the same kind of number. A 200 million market cap at a 0.95 ratio and a 200 million market cap at a 0.12 ratio are wildly different assets. The first is roughly fully priced. The second is a bet that the market will absorb years of scheduled selling, and I have watched people treat the two as interchangeable, then sit confused while the second one grinds down for a year with its FDV barely moving.
None of this needs paid data. The three figures sit on every aggregator, the division takes ten seconds, and unlock schedules are public. We fold supply ratios into the market scorecards on Blockcircle because I got tired of doing the lookup by hand, but a spreadsheet and two open tabs get you the same answer. Do the division before the chart gets a vote on your decision.