Coins, Tokens & Crypto Assets
The price per unit tells you almost nothing.
Token standards explain how a token works. Tokenomics asks the other question: why should it be worth anything at all? Supply, demand, incentives, emission, distribution, utility, value accrual — no single figure decides. It is the interplay.
The problem
One costs a thousand times more per unit. Which one is bigger?
Token A looks cheap. Token B looks expensive. Multiply each price tag by the number of units that exist before you decide which is which.
Two tokens, one arithmetic
ILLUSTRATIVE · INVENTED FIGURESOne price tag is 1,000× the other. Press Multiply it out before you rank them.
Illustrative model — every figure on this card is invented to make the arithmetic visible. No real token's supply, price or valuation is being described or claimed here.
Identical. The 1,000× gap in the price tags was cancelled exactly by the 1,000× gap in supply. A price per unit is a total divided by a number of units — a ratio, not a size. On its own it ranks nothing, because you cannot read a division when only one side of it is shown.
Nothing real about the project moved: no new users, no new code, no new demand, no new function. Only the denominator changed — and the price tag halved with it. This is why a token at €0.10 can be valued far more expensively than one at €100, when far more units exist. "Cheaper per unit, so more room to run" compares two numerators and ignores both denominators.
Two more figures, and they disagree. Market capitalisation counts only the units in circulation. Fully diluted valuation counts every unit that will ever exist, locked ones included — and locked tokens are not gone, they have a release date. Two tokens can carry the same market value and very different diluted figures. None of these numbers is a forecast: reading tokenomics well is not the same thing as predicting a price, and that is the single most useful confusion to drop here.
The definition
Three things the numbers actually say.
Tap each card for the mechanism behind it.
Hands on
Five observations. Four of them are warning signals.
Tap a signal to see whether it is a genuine tokenomics warning — and what mechanism sits behind it.
None of these tells you what a price will do. They tell you where the pressure in a token's structure sits — and where it does not.
The bridge
Supply is three figures, and then it keeps going.
What each number covers, and what none of them covers on its own.
Held together, that is the whole tool. A token with a tiny cap and almost no usage is scarce and unused. A heavily used token whose supply grows faster than demand, with large investor unlocks queued behind it, has the demand and an expanding denominator. Real usage, a clear emission schedule and a fair distribution is the structurally sturdier arrangement of the three — and sturdier never means a price will rise. Whether a token is genuinely needed for the system it belongs to is the question the next lesson takes apart: utility tokens.
Check yourself
Five questions.
Answers come straight from this lesson. Submitting completes it.