Fully Diluted Valuation

Fully diluted valuation multiplies the current price by maximum supply rather than circulating supply, so it includes tokens still locked in vesting contracts, unmined or unissued rewards, and treasury allocations. It exists to show the dilution still ahead of an asset whose float is small at launch. Where a protocol has no hard cap on supply, providers usually substitute total supply issued to date, which makes the figure something different from what its name claims.

How it is computed

maximum supply (or total supply where no hard cap exists) x price

Where it misleads

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 that unlock over five or more years at the price of the last trade, ignoring both the time value and the fact that unlock schedules are routinely changed by governance vote. Burn mechanisms such as the EIP-1559 base-fee burn on Ethereum remove supply continuously, which FDV does not model at all. Two assets with identical FDV can have entirely different unlock horizons, so ranking on this column ranks vesting calendars as much as valuations.

The equity comparison, and why it fails

Fully diluted market capitalization; the equity version counts a defined, disclosed set of options, warrants, and convertibles from audited filings, while token maximum supply is a parameter that a governance vote or a contract upgrade can change and that carries no legal commitment to anyone.

Reading a high or a low value

A fully diluted valuation far above market capitalization indicates that a large share of eventual supply is not yet circulating. The figure describes the arithmetic of the supply schedule at today's price; it is not a forecast of any future price or aggregate value.