What is the volume-to-market-cap ratio?
Turnover: the fraction of an asset's market value that changed hands in 24 hours.
The calculation
An asset with a $400 million market cap trading $24 million in a day has a turnover of 0.06, or 6 %. Six percent of its total value changed hands.
Why dividing matters
Raw trading volume is nearly useless for comparison, because it is dominated by size. Ranking assets by volume mostly reproduces the market cap ranking — it tells you which assets are big, which you already knew.
Dividing by market cap removes that effect:
That inversion is the whole point. Turnover asks how intensively an asset is being traded for what it is, which is a question you can ask consistently of a small asset and a large one.
Typical ranges
| Turnover | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| < 0.5 % | Very thin. Moving a meaningful position would take many days of normal trading. |
| 0.5 – 2 % | Light trading relative to size. |
| 2 – 10 % | The range most actively traded assets occupy. |
| 10 – 30 % | High. Sustained interest, or a specific event concentrated into one day. |
| > 30 % | Unusual. Worth checking which venues reported the volume before treating it as genuine. |
Descriptive bands based on where tracked assets typically fall. They are not thresholds used by any Moonboard metric.
Two places Moonboard uses this, in different units
The same measurement appears across the platform in two forms, and the difference matters when reproducing values:
| Where | Form | Note |
|---|---|---|
| LMR | volume / marketCap | Fraction, then log-damped and ranked |
| Moonboard Score | volume / marketCap × 100 | Percentage, then multiplied by 50 and capped at 15 |
| OPS | volume / marketCap × 100 | Percentage, then capped at 10 % |
| WSD | volume / marketCap × 100 | Percentage, log-damped, then ranked |
The Moonboard Score's turnover component multiplies the percentage by 50 and caps at 15, so it reaches maximum at just 0.3 % turnover — a level most actively traded assets clear every day. In practice that component awards full marks to nearly everything and only discriminates among genuinely illiquid assets.
What it cannot tell you
- Depth. Turnover counts completed trades, not what the order book could absorb. High turnover on a thin book means price moves on modest flow.
- Direction. Volume has no sign. Panic selling and enthusiastic buying produce the same turnover.
- Authenticity. Wash trading inflates the numerator, and no filter is applied.
- Persistence. A single day's figure can be dominated by one event. The series matters more than the value.
Market capitalisation also depends on a circulating supply estimate — a provider judgement about which tokens to count. A supply revision changes turnover with no change in trading whatsoever.
Related
- Turnover calculatorCompute it for your own figures
- LMR methodologyHow Moonboard ranks turnover
- Market liquidityWhat turnover is a proxy for
- Liquidity researchWhere the proxy breaks down