In the world of cryptocurrency, it is important to distinguish between Market Cap and Fully Diluted Value (FDV)

In the traditional financial industry, the above two concepts are exactly the same. Regardless of whether the shares are restricted or locked by pledge, they must be included in the calculation of the company's market value. For example, when an A-share listed company just completed its IPO, the share price was 10 yuan per share and the total share capital was 100 million shares. Although 80 million of the 100 million shares were pre-IPO shares and could not be circulated within one year, the company's market value was still calculated by using the price of 10 yuan per share × 100 million total share capital, thus deriving the company's market value of 1 billion yuan.

But in the world of cryptocurrency:

  • Market value = token price × number of tokens in circulation

  • FDV = token price × number of fully released tokens (including tokens locked by contracts or tokens to be newly issued in the future, etc.)

Therefore, there are often some projects in the market that have low circulation rates and seem to have low market capitalizations, but in fact have high FDVs, which makes investors mistakenly believe that the projects are cheap. A typical example is WorldCoin $WLD , a project created by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, which has a market capitalization of approximately $600 million, but a FDV of $23.7 billion and a circulation rate of less than 3%.

The following are 20 well-known cases among the top 100 projects ranked by FDV for reference.