Crypto basics: what you are actually looking at

Before you can judge whether a crypto asset is interesting, you need to know what its numbers actually measure. This guide covers the vocabulary that every market page, scanner and forecast on DUKOIN is built on.

What a crypto asset is

A crypto asset is a digital token recorded on a blockchain, a shared ledger maintained by a network of computers rather than a single company. Ownership is controlled by private keys: whoever controls the key controls the tokens. There is no central registry you can call to reverse a mistaken transfer.

Not all tokens are the same kind of thing. A rough map:

• Base-layer coins such as Bitcoin and Ethereum secure their own networks and are used to pay transaction fees.
• Platform and application tokens are issued by projects built on top of those networks, for governance, fee discounts, staking or access to a service.
• Stablecoins aim to hold a fixed value, usually one US dollar, through reserves or on-chain mechanisms. They can and occasionally do lose that peg.
• Wrapped assets represent another asset on a different chain, for example bitcoin represented on Ethereum. Their value depends on the custodian or bridge behind them.

DUKOIN’s Research Score excludes stablecoins and wrapped assets from its ranking universe because their prices are designed to track something else, so trend and momentum signals would be meaningless.

How prices form

Crypto trades on many venues at once: centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges and over-the-counter desks. Each venue has its own order book, so prices differ by small amounts and arbitrage traders keep them roughly aligned. The price you see on an aggregator like CoinGecko is a volume-weighted blend across venues, not the price you would get on any single exchange.

Because markets never close, there is no official “closing price”. Data providers use a fixed cut-off, typically 00:00 UTC, to define a daily candle. DUKOIN’s daily history and the returns used in our models follow the provider’s daily series.

Market cap, FDV and supply

Three supply figures appear on every asset page:

Market cap = price × circulating supply
Fully diluted valuation (FDV) = price × max supply (or total supply if no max)

Market cap tells you how large the market currently values the asset. It does not tell you how much money “went in”, and it does not mean the asset could be sold for that amount: selling a large share of supply would push the price down.

The gap between market cap and FDV matters. If a token has a market cap of $200 million but an FDV of $1 billion, four-fifths of eventual supply has not reached the market yet. As those tokens unlock for team members, investors or ecosystem funds, they can add selling pressure. Our tokenomics guide goes deeper.

Volume and liquidity

24-hour volume is the total value traded across tracked venues in the last day. Liquidity is a broader idea: how much you can trade without moving the price. High volume usually signals good liquidity, but volume can be inflated by wash trading on poorly regulated venues, so it is a useful clue rather than proof.

A practical rule: the smaller the asset and the thinner its order books, the larger the gap between the quoted price and the price you would actually get. That gap is called slippage. DUKOIN excludes assets with under $500,000 in 24-hour volume from Research Score rankings for exactly this reason.

Returns, volatility and drawdown

Percentage changes over 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days are the most quoted numbers in crypto. They are useful, but a single return says little about risk. Two more measures help:

• Volatility measures how widely returns swing. Large crypto assets often show annualized volatility several times that of a broad stock index.
• Maximum drawdown is the largest fall from a peak to a later trough. Crypto history includes repeated drawdowns of 70% or more, even for the largest assets.

Percentages are also asymmetric. A 50% fall needs a 100% gain just to get back to where you started. That arithmetic is why risk management matters more than picking winners.

Bitcoin as the benchmark

Most crypto assets move with bitcoin much of the time. When BTC falls sharply, the majority of altcoins usually fall too, often by more. For that reason DUKOIN measures momentum relative to BTC and checks whether a decline is market-wide or specific to one asset. A token that is down 15% while BTC is down 14% is telling a very different story from one that is down 15% while BTC is flat.

What makes crypto different

• Always open. Big moves happen on weekends and overnight.
• Fragmented and lightly regulated. Investor protections vary widely by country and venue.
• Self-custody risk. Lost keys or a wrong address usually cannot be undone.
• Information asymmetry. Teams and early investors often know far more about supply schedules and plans than the public.
• Narrative-driven. Prices can move on attention rather than fundamentals, in both directions.

How DUKOIN helps

Every asset page on Live Markets shows price, market cap, FDV, supply, volume and returns with a visible freshness label, so you always know how old a number is. From there, the Research Score helps you decide what deserves a closer look, and our risk management guide helps you think about position size before anything else.