"Market cap" is a vacuous and bogus number. Cryptocurrency advocates and lazy journalists like to talk about it, but it's not actually useful - it’s not money

"Market cap" is a vacuous and bogus number. Cryptocurrency advocates and lazy journalists like to talk about it, but it's not actually useful - it’s not money that was put into the crypto, it’s not a realisable value like a company market cap, it doesn’t affect prices. It’s just an easily-calculated number that sounds good in a headline. It literally doesn't indicate anything. Trading is so thin in any crypto, even Bitcoin, that you could never realise a fraction of the number in any way. If you want to compare interest and activity in crypto assets, you need to compare trading volumes, if you can find good numbers for those. What the drop indicates is that prices in all cryptos track each other, as is usual.