Where Bitcoin and the largest assets stand

Market capitalisation is the simplest way to compare assets of very different unit prices, and it is also the most easily misread. The figure is the current price of one unit multiplied by the number of units believed to exist. For Bitcoin that means the quoted price of a single coin multiplied by the coins that have been mined and are spendable. It is a measure of what the market would pay for the whole outstanding supply at today's price, not a sum of money that has been invested, and not cash that could be withdrawn. If a large holder tried to sell a meaningful fraction of the supply, the price would move long before the sale was complete, and the capitalisation would fall with it. Treat the number as a scale for ranking assets, not as a valuation you could realise.

The ranking on this page is derived, not chosen. The canister asks the exchange for the assets it tracks, orders them by market capitalisation, and returns the four largest. That order is recomputed on every refresh, so an asset that loses its place is replaced without anyone editing this page. Bitcoin is separated out and given the lead because it is the subject of this site; it is not exempt from the ranking, and if its capitalisation fell below the others the strip beneath would say so. Nothing here is hard-coded, and no position is reserved for a favoured name.

ICP appears as a fifth row for a different reason. Internet Computer is the network this site is built on, and it is tracked permanently rather than only when it happens to rank in the top four. That makes its row a fixed reference point: it is always present, always labelled as tracked, and always drawn from the same feed and the same timestamp as the rest. Readers who came to this site through the Internet Computer ecosystem can therefore see how the asset behaves alongside the largest markets without it being promoted or demoted by the ranking.

The 24-hour change is the difference between the current price and the price at the same time on the previous day, expressed as a percentage. It is a short window and it is a noisy one. A two per cent move is ordinary for these assets and says very little about anything beyond the last day of trading; a ten per cent move is worth noticing but is still routine in the historical record. The figure is useful for confirming that the feed is live and for seeing which way sentiment has turned in the last few hours. It is not a trend, and it should never be read as one. For the longer view, the annual and drawdown datasets elsewhere on this site are the better guide.

Every row carries its own source and the time it was last updated, because a price without a timestamp is not a fact. The snapshot is fetched by the site's canister, cached for a few minutes, and stamped with the moment of the last successful fetch. When the exchange cannot be reached the canister serves the last good values and labels them as cached, so you can see at a glance that you are looking at a slightly older reading. When there is nothing cached at all, the panel says so plainly instead of showing a number. That is the whole of the methodology: a single venue, a visible timestamp, and an honest failure mode.