Bitcoin holds as crypto cap gain is not capital inflow

$170B added today? It depends on source and timeframe

Claims that “$170,000,000,000 added to the crypto market cap today” can be true or false depending on which data source is used and what time window “today” refers to. Aggregators track slightly different asset lists and refresh at different moments, so the same market move can produce materially different 24-hour deltas.

According to CoinMarketCap, market capitalization is derived from price and circulating supply, so a large daily change reflects repricing across listed assets rather than a synchronized cash tally. The exact 24-hour lookback and asset coverage can differ by provider, which is why cross-checking methodology and timestamps is necessary before treating a single rounded figure as definitive.

Based on data from TradingView, users often compare the crypto total market cap via the ticker TOTAL with the crypto market cap excluding Bitcoin (TOTAL2) to see whether a jump was BTC-led or broad-based. Looking at both helps reconcile whether a headline number mostly reflects Bitcoin (BTC) or extends across altcoins.

Why market cap is not money inflow

A spike in crypto total market cap is a price-derived snapshot, not proof that the same amount of new money entered the ecosystem. In volatile sessions, a rapid repricing across a few large assets can add or subtract hundreds of billions on paper without corresponding net deposits.

According to CoinGecko, “The market capitalization of a cryptocurrency is calculated by multiplying the amount of circulating tokens with the price of one token.” That arithmetic means a change in market cap is a function of price movement across circulating supply; it does not track funding flows, realized gains, or liquidity on exchanges.

Headlines framed this way can conflate price-based market-cap expansion with money inflow; the former is an accounting result, while the latter would require verified deposit and flow data that market-cap charts do not provide.

Crypto total market cap: how it’s calculated and updated

The crypto total market cap aggregates the reported market caps of constituent coins and tokens into a single figure. Providers may differ on listings, circulating supply methodologies, and whether certain stablecoins or wrapped assets are included, and most update continuously; the displayed “24h change” reflects the provider’s specific timing conventions.

At the time of this writing, Coinbase Global, Inc. (COIN) traded at 157.67 USD, down 1.60% intraday, as of 10:26:52 a.m. EST based on NasdaqGS real-time price data. This equity context does not validate the $170B figure but situates how exchange-exposed businesses can trade while crypto valuations are repricing.