Methodology & standards

How our numbers are made

Anyone can claim their crypto data is honest. This page is how you check ours — including the parts we get wrong, the things we cannot measure, and what we would have to tell you if money ever changed hands.

Market data

Prices, market caps, volumes, supply and all-time highs for 613 assets come from CoinGecko and are written into our own database by a job that runs every five minutes — last completed 13m ago. Pages are rendered from that copy, not from a live call, which is why they load instantly and stay up when an upstream API does not.

Every figure on the site is therefore as of the last sync, never a real-time tick. Where a page can show you that timestamp, it does.

What we check before we publish a number

Reproducing a data feed is not the same as standing behind it. Everything that arrives from upstream is checked against the rest of the market before it reaches a page, and anything that cannot be true is held back rather than published confidently.

This started with a mistake of ours. A tokenized-stock listing arrived with a circulating supply roughly 8.7 million times its real one. That put its market cap at $25.81 trillion and ranked it first on our board, above Bitcoin; it also pushed our headline “total market cap” to $28.07 trillion and reported Bitcoin’s dominance as 4.5%. All of that sat under the words real prices, real market caps until somebody pointed it out. Two things had gone wrong: nothing checked the figure before storing it, and because the source itself ranked that asset #1926 it never appeared in our refresh again — so one bad reading simply froze at the top of our table.

What runs now, on every sync and again on a daily pass over the whole table:

• The source against itself. Each listing carries both a market cap and a rank. When a cap worth a tenth of Bitcoin arrives beside a rank in the thousands, the two cannot both be right, and we believe neither until it is resolved.
• Size against the market. Nothing is several times larger than Bitcoin. A cap that says otherwise is a broken supply figure, not an asset.
• Supply against price. Market cap is price × supply, and price is the hard one to corrupt. A supply that multiplies by twenty-five while the price sits still is an arithmetic error upstream — a real supply event moves the price too.
• Movement against plausibility. Ranks move by minutes of trading, not by orders of magnitude. A cap that jumps twentyfold between two five-minute syncs is held for review.
• Freshness against position. Anything in our top 50 appears in every single refresh, so it cannot quietly fall behind. When one does, the source has stopped standing behind a number we are still printing.
• Each asset against its own kind. The one that would have caught the SPCX row the moment it first arrived, before any of the above. See below.

Not everything here is a cryptocurrency

A tokenized Tesla share, a BlackRock treasury fund, wrapped Bitcoin and Bitcoin itself are four different kinds of claim. We label every asset with which one it is, and where the label changes how the numbers should be read, the coin page says so in a sentence. Ordinary coins get no badge — the label earns its place by being the exception.

That classification is also the sharpest check we have. Crypto market caps follow a power law: Bitcoin is around 11,400× the median coin, and that is correct, so “much bigger than its peers” can never be evidence of anything for a coin. Tokenized wrappers are the opposite. They are bounded by how much of the underlying anyone has actually tokenized, so they cluster: across every tokenized equity we track, the largest is about 3× the median, and for tokenized funds about 19×.

In a group that tight, one member hundreds of times the rest is not a valuation, it is an error. SPCX stood at roughly 370,000× the median tokenized equity. We hold anything past 250×, which leaves more than a tenfold margin above anything legitimate we have ever observed — and the comparison uses the median precisely because a single corrupt member cannot drag it upward. An average would have been pulled up by the bad number until the bad number looked ordinary.

We do not exclude tokenized assets from the rankings. They are real holdings that people are looking for, and hiding them would answer a labelling problem with a disappearance. We label them instead.

A held asset keeps its page, which says plainly that its market data is under review and what tripped. It is removed from the rankings, from the market totals and from our sitemap, and its price stays visible — price comes from trades, not from the supply figure at issue. Right now 1 asset is held.

What we deliberately do not hide. A large market cap with almost no trading volume looks exactly like corrupt data and usually is not: tokenized funds and real-world-asset products genuinely trade that thinly. Those are flagged for us to look at and published unchanged (2 currently). Hiding a real number because it is unusual would be its own kind of dishonesty — and it is worth knowing which market caps are notional rather than realisable, which is the question Sellability exists to answer.

The headline total is no longer our own sum. Adding up the assets we happen to track gave a figure that was both mislabelled and fragile — one bad row landed in it at full weight. The total now comes from a market-wide aggregate computed across every listed asset, and the line beneath it on /prices always states what was actually totalled. We also compare the two on every refresh: our top-500 sum should sit a few percent below the market-wide figure, and a wide divergence means something got past the checks above.

Our own price history

From 2026-08-09 we record one row per asset per UTC day — open, high, low, close, market cap, volume — built from our own repeated observations rather than a vendor's daily bar. 11,305 rows so far. A day we fail to record is a gap we cannot fill later, so the job that writes it is deliberately conservative: if the market data is more than thirty minutes stale, we record nothing for that interval rather than stamping an old price with a new timestamp.

Sellability

Sellability estimates what a position could realistically be sold for, as opposed to what it is quoted at. For a token and a holding size we request live routed sell quotes at a ladder of order sizes and compare each against the reference price.

The rungs are spaced by dollar size, not by proportion of your holding, because price impact responds to how much hits the pool rather than to what fraction of somebody’s bag it represents. From those measurements we interpolate how much could leave under a 1%, 3%, 5% or 10% cost — never beyond the sizes we actually quoted. Where the quotes stop, the estimate stops with them and says so.

We also watch for the point where the market stops responding. Past a certain order size an aggregator returns the same proceeds no matter how much more you offer it: that is the limit of what the pools will absorb, not the price of selling more. Reported as a ceiling — “about $46,000 is all this market will take” — because turning it into a percentage produces a figure that looks like an expensive exit and is really an absent one.

• Reference price — from GeckoTerminal. Never from a small quote: at dust sizes a quote is rounding noise, and during development that produced an exit apparently worth more than paper value.
• Quotes — the OpenOcean aggregator, which routes across Uniswap v2/v3/v4, Aerodrome and others.
• Contract checks — GoPlus, for honeypot behaviour, sell taxes and transfer restrictions. A missing flag is treated as unknown, never as safe.
• Liquidity and pools — GeckoTerminal.

If a contract is flagged unsellable we withhold the exit figure entirely rather than print a number beside a warning, because a number beside a warning invites you to believe the number.

Exchange order books

Where an asset trades on an exchange we can read, we ask the same question of its order book: how many bids are actually resting, and what would walking them return? We read Coinbase and Kraken. Binance answers HTTP 451 from our infrastructure, so it is not consulted and we make no claim about it — that absence is a technical limit, and it is stated here so it can never be mistaken for an editorial one.

We never merge exchange and on-chain figures into one number. They are different kinds of claim. An on-chain sale is permissionless: anyone holding the tokens and some gas can make it. An exchange sale needs an account, cleared identity checks, a supported jurisdiction, the asset already deposited there, and deposits and withdrawals open at the time. Those are five conditions we cannot verify from here, so the exchange figure is labelled as conditional on access and the two are shown side by side, free to disagree.

Venue order is a measurement and is not for sale. Exchanges are listed by what they would actually pay out for your position, and nothing else. A sponsor can be listed in our directory and can pay for placement there; no amount of money reorders this comparison, adds a venue to it, or removes one from it. If that ever changes, it will be written on this page before it appears anywhere else.

There is exactly one place on a Sellability result where a link to an exchange appears: when the on-chain exit has failed and an exchange one would work. If your position cannot leave through the pools but the resting bids on a venue would take it, we say so and link there. It never appears on a good result, because somebody who has just been told their position sells easily has no use for an account they probably already have.

The venue named in that box is chosen by measurement before anything commercial is looked at, and each such link states plainly whether we are paid for it. Today we are paid for neither Coinbase nor Kraken, and the page says so. When that changes the sentence changes with it, because it is written from the same record that pays us rather than typed into the page.

What Sellability cannot tell you

This is the important section.

• Quotes are estimates, not fills. The price moves while you execute, and gas is not included.
• We cover on-chain routes only. For a token that also trades on centralised exchanges, our figure is a floor — you would likely do better on an exchange. Where we can detect this, we say so above the numbers.
• We verify our own arithmetic against on-chain reserves only for constant-product pools. Concentrated-liquidity pools (Uniswap v3) and Uniswap v4 — which keeps every pool's tokens in one shared contract — cannot be independently checked this way, and we report that rather than counting them as verified.
• We do not publish a letter grade. Grades are easy and we have not yet earned one: the back-test that would justify it covers too few pool types. Until then you get a confidence level instead, and "low" is a real answer.
• A quote we can prove is wrong is discarded, not shown. If a smaller slice reports worse friction than a larger one — impossible in a real market — that rung is marked unquotable.

Money, and what it cannot buy

Cryptominium will carry sponsored placement and affiliate links, and every commercial link will be marked. Two rules do not bend:

• Sponsorship buys position, never a rating. No payment changes a score, a review or a Sellability result.
• Commercial relationships are disclosed on the page where they apply, not buried here.

What we will never ask for

We will never ask for your seed phrase, private key, or exchange password. No page on this site will ever be a box you type them into. Our recovery tooling runs offline on your own machine for exactly this reason. Any site — including one claiming to be us — that asks for a seed phrase is stealing from you.

Sellability needs no wallet connection. You paste a public contract address and a number.

Privacy in one paragraph

We set no cookies and run no analytics or third-party trackers. Your theme and currency choices are stored in your own browser. Tool checks are logged with a salted hash of your IP address — enough to stop one visitor exhausting the free services we depend on, not enough to identify you. Full detail on the privacy page.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong we want to know, and we would rather fix it than defend it. Email hello@cryptominium.com.

Cryptominium provides market information and educational tools. We are not a broker, exchange, custodian or financial adviser, we never take custody of your assets, and nothing on this site is financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell. See the full disclaimer.