I track cryptocurrency prices on a couple of sites
I started off using with Coinmarketcap and then moved to Coingecko. Both are good. I generally find Coingecko a lot easier to use. But it’s really a personal choice. Either has more or less of everything you need.
Let’s use Coingecko for this post
That’s what the homepage looks like
Lot of numbers. Yes there are. But its easy to navigate.
Let’s look at the first coin you see and move horizontally (left to right)
Bitcoin
You see something called BTC next to that. That’s the symbol for Bitcoin. Each coin’s got its own symbol, generally of 3-4 characters. Eg. Zilliqa has ZIL, Cardano has ADA, Polkadot has DOT. It’s just a short reference to the coin. Similar to the nick names you may have
Then there’s the price. This is what the coin is currently at. So Bitcoin currently is at $47,017.21. This fluctuates every second or millisecond
Then there’s 3 figures you see 1h, 24h and 7d. This is 1 hour, 24 hours and 7 days. Basically showing how much returns the coin has given or how much has it moved over the periods. So in our case, Bitcoin (or BTC) has moved 1.5% over the last 1 hour, 6.7% over the last 24 hours and 40.9% over the last 7 days.
The next figure you see is 24h Volume. This can be a little complicated, so skip it if you want. But let’s say you’re a writer. You can write 2 pages in one hour. For some weird reason, you decide to write 24 hours at a stretch. So after 24 hours, you’ve written 48 pages. Or you’ve delivered a volume of 48 pages. In the case of cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin here, the traded volume over the last 24 hours has been $87,145,785,415 or $87.1 billion. That’s how much people have bought and sold Bitcoin in the last 24 hours. Like I said it’s complex. So leave it for now.
Finally there’s market cap. This gives you an idea of the size of a coin. Bitcoin has a market cap of $875.6 billion. Below that, you see Ethereum (which is the second biggest coin) which has a market cap of $201.2 billion. So simply put, Bitcoin is 4.3 times the size of Ethereum. So market cap or market capitalization gives you the size of a coin. I’ll write in another post on this. It’s worth understanding a little more of.
Head over to one of these sites I mentioned and check them out. Acquaint yourself with what you just read above. It’s easy, interesting and can be fun
