Altcoins

What we subtract, and why

Bitcoin and Ethereum come out because they are the two assets everything else is usually measured against. Leaving them in would mean a number that mostly tracks Bitcoin, which defeats the point of having it.

Stablecoins come out because they are not investments in a crypto asset — they are dollars parked on a chain. Their market cap moves when people move money in and out of the market, not when the market re-prices.

Tokenized real-world assets come out for the same reason: tokenized gold, treasuries, T-bills, equities and money-market funds are gold and treasuries and equities. They settle on a chain, but their price comes from outside crypto entirely.

What stays in, and why

RWA protocol tokens stay in. ONDO and its peers are ordinary crypto assets whose businesses happen to involve real-world assets. The token is not a claim on a treasury bill; it is a bet on the protocol. Only the tokenized asset itself is removed, never the company that issues it.

Wrapped, staked and receipt tokens are not subtracted — not because they belong, but because they were never counted. Wrapped Bitcoin, staked ether derivatives and lending receipts are kept out of the underlying market-cap ranking we start from, precisely so the same coin is not counted twice. Subtracting them again would remove value that was never added, and would understate altcoins by roughly $13 billion at current prices.

This is the sort of detail that decides whether a number is right, and it is why we publish it rather than leaving you to reverse-engineer it.

Where the numbers come from

Everything comes from CoinGecko, and only from CoinGecko. The total is their aggregate across every listed coin rather than a fixed top-N list, so the history carries no survivorship bias: a coin that was large in 2017 and is worthless now is still in the 2017 figure.

We never mix data providers inside one series. Altcoins is a residual — roughly $500 billion left over from a $2.3 trillion total — so a 2% disagreement between two providers about the total becomes nearly an 8% disagreement about altcoins. Splicing two sources would put a step in the chart that looks like a market event and is not one.

The series is computed once per day, for the UTC day that has just closed, and stored. Every stored day keeps the components behind it, so any future change to this definition can be checked against what was actually subtracted.

How this differs from TradingView

TradingView users know a similar idea as TOTAL3 and its variants, which take the total market cap minus Bitcoin and Ethereum, sometimes minus stablecoins. The two will not agree, and that is expected rather than a fault on either side.

Two reasons. Ours covers the whole market rather than a fixed number of top coins, and ours also removes tokenized real-world assets, which have grown from a rounding error into a meaningful slice.

If you compare our chart to a TOTAL3 chart, expect the shapes to match and the levels to differ.

What it is not

This is a measure of size, not quality. A coin is in this number because it exists and trades, not because it is a good investment or because we think anything of it.

It is also not a count of coins. Adding a thousand new tokens with no value changes nothing here; a single large one moves it.