Thin liquidity: why market cap lies to you
The most common size filter in crypto — "only look at coins above $X market cap" — encodes a quiet assumption: that a big number means a liquid market. It often doesn't. A coin can carry a $9.8 billion valuation while trading 0.4% of it per day; a move on that chart tells you what a handful of participants did, and exiting a position of any size becomes your problem, not the market's.
Turnover, not cap
The metric that actually answers "can I trade this?" is turnover: 24-hour volume divided by market cap. Our screener flags a coin as thin when turnover falls below ~1.5% or when absolute daily volume is under $3M — the second clause catches small caps whose turnover looks respectable only because the cap itself is tiny. The threshold sits around the bottom decile of a top-250 scan, so the flag marks genuine outliers, not half the table.
Why unit price fools people twice
A $0.015 coin feels cheap and small, and a $60,000 coin feels huge — but unit price is just supply arithmetic. The $0.015 coin from the example above was the $9.8B one. This cuts both ways: dismissing low-priced coins as "micro-caps" and trusting high caps as "safe to trade" are the same mistake wearing two hats.
What we do with it
- Every screener row shows turnover as a column, with the thin-liquidity ones highlighted.
- A liquidity filter lets you hide thin coins — or show only them, if dislocations are your game.
- The same test runs server-side and client-side from one shared module, so the badge and the filter can never disagree.
None of this says thin coins can't run — they often run hardest, precisely because it takes so little flow to move them. It says: know which kind of chart you are reading before you size a position off it.