Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV)
FDV is calculated by multiplying a token's current price by its maximum possible supply — the hard cap on how many tokens the project will ever create. Compare that with market cap, which uses only the tokens circulating right now. When those two numbers differ sharply, it signals that a large portion of supply has not yet been released to the market.
Why does the gap matter? Many projects release tokens gradually through schedules called unlocks — future dates when tokens held by founders, early investors, or protocol treasuries become transferable. Suppose a token trades at $10 and 100 million tokens are circulating, giving a market cap of $1 billion. But if the maximum supply is 1 billion tokens, the FDV is $10 billion — ten times larger. Traders typically watch unlock schedules because new supply hitting the market can pressure prices.
A common confusion is treating a low market cap alone as a sign of a "small" project. If FDV is enormous relative to market cap, much of the supply is simply locked away for now, not gone. Checking both figures side by side gives a more complete picture of potential dilution — the reduction in each existing token's share of total ownership as new supply is released. You can track live token data on /crypto.