The market capitalization of a cryptocurrency is its price multiplied by the number of coins currently in circulation. The figure tells you how much the market would pay for all circulating units of a coin combined if each were valued at the current price. On Friday morning, November 6, the entire crypto market came to around $2.58 trillion according to data from CoinGecko, the equivalent of about 2.30 trillion euros. Bitcoin alone accounted for a good $1.53 trillion of that.

The figure is the main sorting key of every crypto list, from the ranking on CoinMarketCap to our overview of the largest coins. But the metric has limits that many investors only notice when a token is barely tradable despite a high rank. This guide explains how…