Market cap is a token's latest price multiplied by the number of tokens in circulation. FDV (fully diluted valuation) is the price multiplied by the total supply. Liquidity is the money actually sitting in the pool you trade against. On most Solana memecoins, including pump.fun launches, market cap and FDV are the same number, and neither can be cashed out: liquidity is what decides how much you could really sell for.
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The words you need first
- Supply: how many tokens exist. Standard pump.fun coins have a fixed total supply of one billion.
- Circulating supply: the tokens that can be traded now, as opposed to tokens locked up or reserved.
- Burned tokens: tokens sent somewhere they can never be moved from, so they no longer count.
- Pool: the pot of a token and SOL (or USDC) that buyers and sellers trade against. See how memecoin trading works.
- Price impact: how far your own trade moves the price.
What is the difference between market cap and FDV?
Market cap uses the circulating supply and FDV uses the total supply, so FDV is bigger only when some tokens are not yet in circulation. DexScreener's token listing docs define FDV as total supply minus burned supply, multiplied by price, and say that in most cases FDV will be the same as market cap.
The gap matters for projects that hold back tokens for a team or investors to release later. Those future tokens can be sold into the market, so FDV shows the value if they all existed today. A pump.fun memecoin has no such schedule: all one billion tokens exist from the start, so market cap equals FDV.
One catch: where a team supplies its own circulating supply figure through DexScreener's paid Enhanced Token Info or through CoinGecko, DexScreener uses it to calculate market cap. A self-reported figure can make market cap look smaller than FDV. When the two differ on a memecoin, find out why.
How is market cap worked out on a memecoin?
Take an invented pump.fun-style coin with a supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens. The last trade was at $0.0005 per token.
- Market cap: 1,000,000,000 × $0.0005 = $500,000
- FDV: the same, $500,000
That $500,000 is the last trade price applied to every token, including tokens nobody has tried to sell. No one has $500,000 waiting to buy them. It is a label, not money.
It also moves fast. In the thin pool described below, a single $1,000 buy pushes the price up about 21%, which adds roughly $105,000 to the market cap. One small trade can create a headline number that looks like serious growth.
What does liquidity mean in crypto?
Liquidity is the value of the tokens sitting in a trading pool, ready for you to trade against. DexScreener shows it in US dollars, and it usually counts both sides of the pool together: the memecoin side and the SOL or USDC side.
When you sell a memecoin, you take SOL out of the pool. So the most any seller could ever take is the SOL side, roughly half the liquidity figure in a typical pool, and in practice a lot less, because each sale makes the next one worse.
How much could you actually sell for?
Many Solana memecoin pools use a constant-product formula, and pump.fun has said its PumpSwap pools work this way (The Block). It means the amount of token multiplied by the amount of SOL stays the same after each trade (before fees). Selling adds tokens and removes SOL, so the price drops with every token you sell.
Take our $500,000 coin in two versions: one with $100,000 of liquidity and one with $20,000. This is how much you would get for selling different shares of the supply, before fees:
| You sell | Worth at the last price | Pool with $100,000 liquidity | Pool with $20,000 liquidity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.1% of supply | $500 | $495 | $476 |
| 1% of supply | $5,000 | $4,545 | $3,333 |
| 5% of supply | $25,000 | $16,667 | $7,143 |
| 10% of supply | $50,000 | $25,000 | $8,333 |
In the thin pool, selling 10% of supply gets back about a sixth of its "value" and drops the price by around 97%. Buying works the same way in reverse: $1,000 in the thin pool buys about 9% fewer tokens than the last price suggests. Jupiter and other apps show this as price impact before you confirm. See slippage and priority fees.
Key point: Market cap tells you what the last trade implies. Liquidity tells you what the exit can hold.
What is the liquidity to market cap ratio?
It is liquidity divided by market cap. Our deep example is $100,000 against $500,000, or 20%. The thin one is $20,000 against $500,000, or 4%. The lower the ratio, the less of the headline value could ever be sold.
There is no official safe level, and the ratio changes with every trade. Use it to compare coins and to spot a market cap that has run far ahead of the money behind it. Also check whether the liquidity can be withdrawn by whoever added it: read liquidity locks and burns.
Is a low market cap coin a good buy?
Not by itself. A low market cap means a coin is small, not cheap. With a billion tokens, the price per token is always a tiny number, so it tells you nothing. The "room to grow" pitch is how new coins get sold to later buyers.
Small coins usually come with thin liquidity, a few wallets holding a lot of supply and a high chance of fading to nothing. Most pump.fun coins never even finish their bonding curve: see what is pump.fun? This is education, not financial advice.
How does holder concentration change the picture?
Liquidity is shared by everyone who might sell, and whoever sells first gets the best price. If the top wallets hold 30% of supply in our deep pool, selling it all would take about $37,500 of the $50,000 SOL side and crash the price by around 94%, leaving very little for everyone else.
So the useful question is how much of the supply a few wallets control, and whether those wallets are secretly linked. See how to check holders on Solscan, how to read Bubblemaps and insider wallets.
Where to find these numbers on DexScreener
The token page shows liquidity, FDV and market cap in the panel of figures beside the chart, and you can switch the chart between price and market cap. Our guide to reading a DexScreener page explains the rest of the panel.
A quick routine:
- Check market cap and FDV match. If they do not, find out why.
- Divide liquidity by market cap.
- Work out roughly what your position is as a share of supply, and what selling it would do to the price.
- Check the top holders.
- Paste the contract address into our rug check to see its warning signs graded A to F.
Related
- How to read a DexScreener page
- What liquidity locks and burns do and don't protect
- Slippage and priority fees on Solana
- How to check a token's holders on Solscan