A coin arrives on a large exchange
A listing is a coin appearing in trading on a venue, often for the first time in its life. From the outside it looks like a celebration and the start of a run. Inside, it is a handover of goods from one set of hands to another.
- Float
- How many coins actually circulate right now, as opposed to how many exist on paper. A small float is easy to push up and just as easy to collapse.
- Fully diluted value
- What the coin would be worth if the entire supply were already trading. The gap between that and today's price tells you how much supply is still coming.
- Vesting
- The schedule on which locked tokens are released: this much on this date, usually mapped out two or three years ahead.
- Slippage
- The gap between the price you saw and the price your trade actually got. It grows once your order is larger than the book.
- Capacity
- How much money actually fits into a given trade before the price runs away. The main question behind almost any find, and the least pleasant one.
- New contracts this month
- 6
- Under watch now
- 9 coins
- Last listing
- 2 days ago
Why it happens
On day one two completely different crowds meet in one book. One is buying the headline: a major exchange, so this must be serious. The other is selling what it got cheap or free — the early round, the team, a fund.
The first crowd is exhausted within hours. The second keeps going for months, and here is why: only part of a new coin's supply circulates, which is its float. The rest is locked and released on a schedule, the vesting. Every release brings fresh sellers, to whom the current price still looks generous.
Which gives you a simple check to run before anything else: compare today's price with the fully diluted value — what the coin would be worth with the whole supply trading. A wide gap means one thing only, that there is a great deal of supply still ahead.
And a new coin has no history. There is nothing to lean on to judge whether this is expensive or cheap: no previous levels, no familiar range. The price looks for a level blind, and usually finds it below where it opened.
How people use it
- The first days are noise: no history, no rules, no book worth leaning on.
- The interesting part starts where the hype has finished and the release schedule has not.
- The most useful thing to learn beforehand is who got these tokens before you, and at what price.
- The constraint here is almost never the idea. It is capacity: a young book takes very little, and slippage eats the difference.
Where it breaks
For some coins, instead of the long bleed, a second wave arrives: another large venue, inclusion in somebody's index, any excuse at all — and the price goes above where it opened. The release schedule does nothing to prevent that.
What we track here
- Spots a new contract the moment it appears in an exchange's instrument list, rather than when the blog post gets noticed.
- Records the first week's price range, because that range is the reference every later move gets measured against.
- Follows the same token's release schedule, since fresh supply keeps arriving for months after day one.
- Measures depth in the book rather than daily volume, so the size the new market can take is a number and not a guess.
- You can tell a listing with a tiny float from one without before you size anything.
- You know how much can be traded without moving the price — usually far less than the volume figure suggests.
- You get the calendar of supply still to come, which is the part that decides the next few months.