Price, volume, TVL: reading different numbers differently

Digital asset data comes with so many numbers that it's easy to misread. Here are three metrics that often get mixed up.

Market cap and volume

• Market cap is price × circulating supply. It's how much the market currently values the asset.
• 24-hour volume is the amount actually traded in a day. It shows liquidity: whether you can buy or sell when you want.

A large market cap with thin volume makes big orders hard to move. A sudden jump in volume means you should first check for an event such as a listing, an announcement or liquidations.

TVL (Total Value Locked)

TVL is the estimated dollar value of assets deposited in a chain's or protocol's DeFi. It shows how much capital is tied up in an ecosystem, but it's different from volume or active users. TVL rises even when only the price of the deposited assets rises.

Check when the data was updated

• Free APIs usually lag by tens of seconds to a few minutes.
• Providers aggregate different exchanges and rules, so numbers differ slightly.
• Showing when the value was fetched and where it came from is the baseline.

The BLOCKKEY Markets page follows the same rule and shows the source and the last fetch time.

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