FDV
Fully Diluted Valuation. The market cap a token would have if every token that will ever exist were already in circulation. FDV is what the project would be worth if all locked, vesting, or unminted tokens were trading today.
Also known as: fully diluted valuation, FDV market cap
FDV is the brutally honest valuation metric. Where market cap multiplies current price by circulating supply (which can hide a lot of overhang), FDV multiplies current price by maximum supply (which exposes everything). A project with $100M market cap and $1B FDV has 90% of its eventual supply still to come, which means the current “valuation” understates the future supply pressure by 10x.
The gap between market cap and FDV is the real signal. A project where MCap and FDV are within 20% of each other (most modern fair-launch projects, NEAR after full vesting, Bittensor’s well-distributed schedule) has minimal future dilution. A project where FDV is 5-10x current market cap has years of unlock pressure ahead, and every unlock is a potential sell event. The same token can look “cheap” by market cap and “expensive” by FDV simultaneously, and the truth is usually somewhere closer to the FDV number for long-term holders.
FDV-vs-revenue ratios are the closest crypto comes to traditional finance’s P/E ratios. A protocol with $10M annual revenue and $100M FDV is at 10x revenue, which is in line with mature SaaS comparables. A protocol with $10M annual revenue and $5B FDV is at 500x revenue, which is meme-tier valuation regardless of how good the underlying business looks. The OYM Returns Score’s Revenue Sustainability dimension thinks in these terms: how much real revenue does the protocol need to grow into to justify its current FDV?
The honest framing for any token is to anchor to FDV when thinking about long-term holding and to market cap when thinking about short-term liquidity. Market cap tells you what the float can absorb today. FDV tells you what the float will need to absorb over the full vesting timeline. Most retail buyers look at market cap and get burned when the FDV catches up to it. The OYM project reviews report both numbers when they matter and explain the gap when it’s significant.