Fully Diluted Valuation
The current price multiplied by the maximum or total eventual supply, showing what the asset would be worth if every unit already existed.
Fully diluted valuation holds price constant while adding supply that has not been issued, which is a deliberately artificial combination: the two assumptions cannot both hold as supply arrives over years. Read alongside market capitalization, it describes structure rather than value, since a wide gap between them means only a small share of eventual supply is currently in public hands. The calculation is ambiguous in practice, because some providers use maximum supply, others total supply, and for assets with no cap the figure is either undefined or based on a projected supply the provider chooses. Unlike a diluted share count in equity analysis, the schedule behind it can be lengthened, shortened, or expanded by governance.
In practice
Two providers can publish different fully diluted valuations for the same asset simply because one uses maximum supply and the other uses total supply.
The common misunderstanding
Fully diluted valuation is not a forecast or a target; it is arithmetic that freezes today's price and adds units that do not yet exist.
The figure this maps to
What every token that will ever exist would be worth if all of them traded at the current price.
Limits: For assets with open-ended issuance, including Ethereum after its 2022 move to proof-of-stake and most governance tokens with ongoing emissions, there is no maximum supply and the published FDV is built on a substituted number that is not comparable to a genuinely capped asset. It prices tokens…