Vitalik Buterin
1 min readMay 3, 2017

--

> We recommend updating all default metrics from circulating supply to total supply.

This completely ignores why the default was changed to circulating supply in the first place. Market cap is often used in practice as a way of comparing which projects are the largest and most successful, and having a high ranking is itself quite a potent marketing tool. Back in 2013 people were upset because Ripple with its then ~90% non-circulating supply briefly exceeded Bitcoin in market cap, and thought that it was unfair that tokens could so easily gain very high market caps just by locking down most of their supply. Hence, market cap indicators switched to showing circulating supply to make things fairer.

I’d instead recommend to show “Market cap (circulating)” and “Market cap (imputed)” side by side, where the latter column represents all coins that will be created or available within 5 years, and continue to sort by circulating market cap.

--

--