A better way of looking at total cryptocurrency market cap

Let’s face it — total cryptocurrency market capitalization is a vanity metric. And yet it’s brought up and written about all the time. CoinMarketCap, the company that tracks it, defines the metric as a sum of market caps of all cryptocurrencies it lists. And there are currently nearly 2,200 cryptocurrencies listed there.

Total cryptocurrency market cap is a flawed metric because it counts more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies, out of which a majority are completely illiquid and irrelevant. Moreover, the market cap of the majority of smaller cryptocurrencies is heavily overstated.