The two formulas#
- Market cap = price × circulating supply (tokens that can trade now).
- FDV = price × total supply (every token that will ever exist).
For a project token with team or investor tokens unlocking over years, the gap can be large. FDV then shows what the market is implicitly paying for tokens that do not trade yet.
For launchpad memecoins the supply is fixed and created at launch, so screens quote one number: price × 1 billion for a pump.fun coin. At a price of $0.00002 per token, that is a $20,000 market cap.
Why market cap is not money in the coin#
Market cap multiplies the *last* price by every token, and nobody could sell every token at that price. The money that actually sits behind a memecoin is the SOL in its curve or pool, and selling walks the price down the same formula buying walked it up. See bonding curve.
pump.fun makes this concrete. Its curve starts at 30 virtual SOL against 1,073,000,000 virtual tokens, so a coin with zero real buys already shows a value of about 28 SOL, roughly $4,200 at an illustrative $150 per SOL, while holding no real SOL at all.
Those reserves are published in the pump.fun program docs. So a "$30k market cap" coin on its curve can hold far less than $30,000 of buyers' money; pump.fun market cap explained works through the numbers.
How to use market cap when trading#
Use market cap to compare coins at similar stages and to think about upside in multiples. Use liquidity, the SOL in the curve or pool, to decide size: it tells you how far your own order will move the price.
Holder concentration matters too: if a few wallets hold much of the supply, much of the market cap is theirs to sell. What market cap to buy a memecoin at covers the trade-offs by stage.
On Fullport, an order whose impact would exceed 15% is sent back for resizing by the impact cap, which is liquidity speaking, not market cap. Trade the same coins in the browser terminal or with Fullport Tap, and keep 80% of payouts.
Quick answers
- Is FDV the same as market cap for pump.fun coins?
- Effectively yes. A pump.fun coin's total supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens exists from launch with no future emissions, so price times circulating supply and price times total supply give the same figure on most screens.
- Why is market cap not the money in a memecoin?
- Market cap multiplies the last trade price by every token in existence. The money actually available to sellers is the SOL in the coin's curve or pool, and every sell lowers the price, so holders could never all sell at the quoted value.
- What does FDV mean in crypto?
- FDV stands for fully diluted valuation: the token's current price multiplied by its total supply, including tokens that are locked or not yet issued. It shows what the whole supply would be worth at today's price.