Realized Market Cap (USD)

Definition

The sum USD value based on the USD closing price on the day that a native unit last moved (i.e., last transacted) for all native units.

Name

MetricID

Category

Subcategory

Type

Unit

Interval

Realized Market Cap (USD)

CapRealUSD

Market

Market Capitalization

Product

USD

1 day

Details

  • This metric takes the ledger state of the asset, assigns a date of last movement for each account/unspent output, multiplies the balance of the account/value of the output by the price at the date of last movement and sums all of those numbers for the asset’s ledger.

  • The state of the ledger is the one at the last available block for that day.

  • Only the native units balance is considered, L2 tokens (ERC-20, etc.) are not taken into account.

  • For UTXO chains, last activity is the date of creation of the output.

  • For account-based chains, last activity is either the last date the account was the sender of a ledger change, or its time of creation, whichever is more recent.

Chart

Asset-Specific Details

  • This metric is not available for assets that have full privacy, like Monero, Grin.

  • For assets that have opt-in privacy features, like ZCash, it only takes the non-private balances into account. The realized cap is first computed over the non-private balances, then scaled so that ratios like MVRV can be computed: Realized Cap = Non-private realized Cap + Private Supply * (Non-private realized cap/ (Total Current Supply - Private supply)) This can be understood as taking the non-private supply’s price implied by the realized cap (Non-private realized cap / Non private supply) and assigning that price to the private supply.

Example

For an asset whose ledger is:

Account

Balance

Time of last movement

Price at last movement

Realized balance

A

100

2010-01-01

$0

$0

B

1000

2016-01-01

$10

$10,000

C

500

2019-01-01

$100

$50,000

The realized cap would be $0 + $10,000 + $50,000 = $60,000

For assets like ZEC, assuming there’s 5M native units outstanding, 1M private, 4M non-private. If the realized cap of the non-private supply is $1B, the total realized cap is computed as: $1B * (1M * ($1B / (5M - 1M)) = $1.25B

Release History

  • Conceptualized by Coin Metrics

  • Released in the 1.0 release of NDP

Interpretation

Realized capitalization (sometimes referred to as Realized Value) is one of Coin Metrics’ flagship metrics, first introduced in a talk by Nic Carter in 2018. Realized cap aggregates units of supply according to their market price when they last moved on-chain. The original intent was to discount the weight of long-lost coins, in particular in Bitcoin, as a significant fraction of supply is inert and has not moved since 2010 (and can be presumed lost). Additionally, realized cap is a more faithful measure of economic significance for forks with limited uptake, as conventional measures like market cap naively presume that the entire stock of coins is liquid and market-available. Interpretations vary, but realized cap is perhaps best-understood as a metric which captures the average cost basis of all current holders. It has been used to devise popular oscillators and derivative metrics.

See Also

Availability for Assets

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