Does CoinGecko use max supply or total supply for FDV?

Total supply — already-issued tokens, including those locked in vesting. Verified against the live API on 2026-08-25: Bitcoin's published FDV of $1,590,664,795,620 matches price times its 20.07M issued coins, not price times the 21M cap, which would give $1,663,977,000,000. For assets where total and max supply are equal, such as Chainlink and Cardano, the two bases give the same answer and the distinction does not arise.

How do I calculate fully diluted valuation properly?

Multiply the current price by max supply where a hard cap is published. Where none is published — Ethereum, for example — issued supply is the correct denominator, because there is no cap to dilute toward and FDV legitimately converges on market cap. The figure you should distrust is one that quotes 'FDV' without saying which supply it used.

How can I tell which basis a site used?

Subtract market cap from the FDV shown. The result should equal locked supply multiplied by price. On AVAX at $7.53 the max-supply basis gives $2,170,357,132 on both sides of that equation, matching to the dollar; the issued-supply basis gives $236,570,625 on one side and $2,170,357,132 on the other. If a dilution panel shows an overhang ratio next to a locked-supply figure, it is claiming both, and only one basis makes them consistent.

Is the difference actually material?

For assets with unminted supply, yes. AVAX moves from a 1.07x to a 1.67x overhang — a 55% understatement of the fully diluted figure — and 288.2M AVAX worth roughly $2.17B is the entire gap. Polkadot has 400,353,145 DOT still to issue and reads about 1.00x on the narrower basis. For assets whose total already equals their cap, the difference is zero.

FDV Uses Issued Supply, Not Max Supply

Fully diluted valuation is supposed to answer one question: what would this be worth if every token that can ever exist, existed? Most published FDV figures do not answer that. They answer a narrower one — what it would be worth if every token already MINTED were circulating — and for any asset with supply still to be issued, those are different numbers. The gap is not rounding. On one of the assets below it is 55%, and it sits precisely where the dilution risk you were trying to measure is hiding.

Two numbers, one name

Three supply figures get published per token and they are routinely conflated. Circulating supply is what is tradeable now. Total supply is what has been issued — minted, including tokens locked in vesting contracts. Max supply is the hard cap, everything that can ever exist. CoinGecko's `fully_diluted_valuation` field is price times TOTAL supply. So it prices in tokens that are locked but already minted, and prices out tokens that have not been minted yet. If a project's emission schedule still has tokens to create, that future issuance is simply absent from the number.

Check it yourself in one call

This is not something to take on trust — the API is public and the arithmetic is a multiplication. Pull the market rows for a few assets and compare the published FDV against both candidate denominators. Bitcoin makes the cleanest test because its cap is famous: 20.07M mined against a 21M cap. The published FDV tracks the mined figure, not the cap.

curl -s 'https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/coins/markets?vs_currency=usd&ids=bitcoin,avalanche-2,polkadot'

Measured 2026-08-25:

coin        published FDV        price x total        price x max
bitcoin     $1,590,664,795,620   $1,590,679,050,861   $1,663,977,000,000
avalanche   $3,487,813,493       $3,489,711,191       $5,421,600,000
polkadot    $1,520,637,096       $1,520,792,270       $1,879,008,600

The published column matches the middle one every time.

What it does to a dilution verdict

A dilution read is usually FDV divided by market cap: how many times the current valuation would the fully diluted one be. Run that both ways on Avalanche and you get two different verdicts from the same live data. On the issued-supply basis it is 1.07x — barely any overhang, the sort of number that reads as 'nothing to worry about'. Against the 720M cap it is 1.67x. The 288.2M AVAX that have not been minted yet are the entire difference, and they are exactly what a dilution metric exists to warn you about.

AVAX, 2026-08-25   price $7.53

  market cap                  $3,251,242,868
  FDV at issued supply        $3,487,813,493   ->  1.07x overhang
  FDV at max supply           $5,421,600,000   ->  1.67x overhang

  not yet minted: 288,228,039 AVAX

DOT is the same shape: 400,353,145 DOT still to issue,
and an issued-supply overhang that rounds to 1.00x.

The one-line test that catches it

You do not need to know which basis a site used, because the arithmetic tells you. If FDV is genuinely fully diluted, then FDV minus market cap is the value of everything not yet circulating — which must equal locked supply times price. Run it on the max-supply basis for AVAX and both sides come to $2,170,357,132, matching to the dollar. Run it on the issued-supply basis and the same subtraction gives $236,570,625, which is not the value of 288.2M tokens at $7.53. Any dilution panel that shows an overhang ratio beside a locked-supply figure can be checked this way in about ten seconds, and a panel that fails the check is telling you two things that cannot both be true.

FDV - market cap  ==  locked supply x price

max-supply basis:
  $5,421,600,000 - $3,251,242,868 = $2,170,357,132
  288,228,039 AVAX x $7.53        = $2,170,357,132   MATCH

issued-supply basis:
  $3,487,813,493 - $3,251,242,868 =   $236,570,625
  288,228,039 AVAX x $7.53        = $2,170,357,132   FAIL

Neither number is wrong — they answer different questions

It is worth being fair to the data source here. Issued-supply FDV is a perfectly reasonable figure: it tells you what the token would be worth if everything already created were liquid, which is the relevant question for near-term unlock pressure. Max-supply FDV tells you what it would be worth at the end of the emission schedule. The failure is not in the data, it is in the labelling — 'FDV' gets used for both, so a reader cannot tell which question was answered. Naming the denominator is the whole fix, and it costs one word.

When issued supply is the right answer

Not every token has a cap, and for those the issued-supply figure is the correct one rather than a fallback. Ethereum publishes no max supply; its circulating and total supply are the same number, so FDV and market cap converge and the honest overhang is 1.00x. That is a real reading, not a missing one — there is no cap to dilute toward. The mistake would be substituting a guess, or leaving the field blank in a way that reads as an error. An uncapped asset genuinely has no locked overhang to report.

What we do with it

Our tokenomics panel computes the overhang against max supply where a cap is published, falls back to the data provider's own figure where none is, and falls back to market cap where neither exists. More importantly it names the basis in the caption — 'at max supply / market cap' rather than just 'FDV / market cap' — because the caption used to describe the division without naming the input, and the input is the whole question. This was not a hypothetical for us: the panel once showed a 1.07x overhang labelled low dilution directly beside a locked-supply figure of 288.2M AVAX, two claims that cannot both be true on the same card.

Summary

FDV is quoted from two different denominators under one name, and the common one — price times already-issued supply — excludes exactly the future issuance that dilution analysis is about. Measured live, that is the difference between a 1.07x and a 1.67x overhang on AVAX, and between 'low dilution' and 'high dilution ahead'. The check takes ten seconds: FDV minus market cap must equal locked supply times price, and if it does not, you are reading the narrower number. Neither figure is wrong. Not knowing which one you have is.

The FDV You Are Quoted Uses Issued Supply, Not the Cap