Price (Market Pair, Cryptoasset)

Our prices are derived from APIs, rather than assigned by us.

• Every minute, the various exchanges are queried via API endpoints for their most recent market data.
• All data is run through several data cleaning and verification algorithms to ensure data integrity.
• The price for each individual market pair is calculated by taking the unconverted price reported directly from the exchange and converting it to USD using CoinMarketCap’s existing reference prices.

The price of a cryptoasset is calculated using an algorithm that factors the ‘trustability’ or ‘confidence’ from the distribution of prices reported by an exchange. According to the law of large numbers, the expected value of the price distribution should converge to the real value of the asset. The rationale for using the distribution of prices reported by an exchange is because each market pair can be viewed as a sample of the ‘real’ price. If an asset is traded across many exchanges, its reported prices will converge to the expected value of the distribution. When we have a large number of markets, the expected value of price distribution should converge to the ‘real’ price.

Some prices are excluded from the average, denoted by an asterisk (*) on the markets tab if the price does not seem indicative of a free market price; for example, when an exchange disables withdrawals or deposits, or regulatory conditions make it impossible for anyone else outside of a certain geographical region to buy coins.

Some prices are also excluded when our algorithms detect that the reported price is a significant outlier when compared to other market pairs for the same cryptocurrency, denoted by three asterisks (***) on the markets tab.

The volume of any cryptoasset is the total spot trading volume reported by all exchanges over the last 24 hours for that cryptoasset. Some market pairs are excluded from the sum, denoted by two asterisks (**) on the markets tab, if the exchange does not enforce a trading fee or otherwise offers significant incentives to trade on the market pair. Market pairs with these characteristics are rather susceptible to wash trading, resulting in artificially inflated reported volumes. From our experience, we have found that it is better to exclude these markets to give a better representation of relative trading volumes for the crypto market.