Started at 1,000. Stablecoins and gold tokens excluded. Members are the ten largest coins at each update, and the divisor adjusts when they change so the line stays continuous.
Countdown
Bitcoin halving
Every 210,000 blocks, the reward for mining new Bitcoin is cut in half.
Calculators for prices, market caps, history and risk, using live data.
History
Past investment
What money put into a coin on a past date is worth today.
Your investmentSame money in BitcoinMoney put in
Steady buying
DCA simulator
Buying a fixed amount on a schedule, compared with putting it all in on day one.
Steady buyingAll on day oneMoney put in
Reality check
Price target
What a target price would mean for a coin's market cap.
Converter
Convert
Any coin to dollars or to another coin, at live prices.
Head to head
Compare coins
Side-by-side price, size, supply and performance.
Market cap comparison
What if
The price a coin would have with another coin's market cap.
Flippening watch
Closest races
Neighbours nearest to swapping rank (stablecoins excluded).
Dominance
Market share
Share of total crypto market cap.
Profit & loss
Return check
What a past buy is worth at today's price.
Risk
Position size
How much to buy so a stop-out loses only what you choose.
A stop-loss isn't guaranteed. Gaps and slippage can fill past your stop and make the loss bigger.
Supply
Dilution check
Circulating vs. maximum supply, and the cap if every coin existed.
Investing
Average cost
Your weighted average price across several buys.
Investing
Break-even
The selling price that gets your money back after fees.
Risk
Comeback
The gain needed to recover from a drop.
Start
After drop
Investing
Rebalancer
Trades needed to get back to your target mix.
Coin
Now
Target %
Trade
Today's crypto prices by market cap
How volatile is crypto, and how deep do drawdowns go?
Bitcoin has lost more than 70% of its value at least three times, and it's still the steadiest large coin there is.
That's the scale of volatility in crypto. Understanding it isn't about predicting the next fall. It's about sizing what you hold so that a normal fall doesn't knock you out.
Swings and falls
A drawdown is the fall from a high to a later low. A 64% drop needs a 176% rise just to get back, which is why deep falls are hard to recover from.
Crypto is far more volatile than most stocks. Daily moves of 5% are routine for large coins and small coins can move 30% in a day.
A drawdown measures pain from the top. Bitcoin has fallen more than 70% from a high several times in its history. Many smaller coins have fallen more than 90% and never recovered.
Recovering from a drawdown takes more than the drop itself, so a 50% fall needs a 100% gain to get back to even.
What history looks like
Bitcoin fell about 84% from its 2017 peak to its 2018 low, and about 77% from its 2021 peak to its 2022 low. Ether's drawdowns have been deeper, and many smaller coins from each cycle never came back.
Even in rising years, falls of 20 to 30 percent within weeks have been normal.
Living with volatility
The simplest control is size. If a coin can fall 80%, ask what an 80% fall in that position would do to you, and size it so the answer is survivable.
Spreading buys over time and avoiding borrowed money also reduce the chance that a single bad week forces you to sell at the bottom.
Putting a number on volatility
Volatility grows with the square root of time. A 3% daily figure becomes about 7.9% weekly and about 57% yearly, not 21% and 1,095%.
Volatility is usually reported as the standard deviation of returns, a measure of how far typical moves sit from the average move. If a coin's daily returns have a standard deviation of 3%, then on most days its move falls somewhere between about minus 3% and plus 3%, with bigger days less common but far from rare.
To compare periods, the daily figure is scaled by the square root of time, not by time itself. Crypto trades every day, so the yearly figure is the daily one times the square root of 365, which is about 19.1. A 3% daily volatility becomes roughly 57% a year. A week is the square root of 7, about 2.65, so roughly 7.9% a week. Stock markets trade about 252 days a year, which is why their conversions use a different number.
Two cautions. First, the square-root rule assumes each day is independent, and crypto often has streaks, so real yearly swings can be wider. Second, crypto returns have fat tails, meaning days of 10% or 20% happen far more often than a neat bell curve would suggest. Treat a volatility number as a typical size of move, not a limit.
Why swings cost money even when they cancel out
Equal percentage gains and losses don't cancel. Two rounds of plus and minus 10% leave $98.01, and one round of plus and minus 50% leaves $75.
Up and down moves of the same size don't cancel. Start with $100. A 10% rise takes it to $110 and a 10% fall takes it to $99. Repeat the pair and you're at $98.01. The average move was zero, yet you lost about 2%. With bigger swings the effect grows fast. A 50% rise and a 50% fall turn $100 into $150 and then $75.
This gap is called volatility drag. Over many periods, compounded growth lands below the simple average of returns by roughly half the variance. That's why two coins with the same average monthly return can end up far apart, because the more volatile one usually finishes lower.
It matters most for leveraged products. A token or fund that aims for twice the daily move resets every day, so in a choppy, sideways market it can lose value even though the underlying coin ends where it started. Read the product terms before holding any daily-reset leverage for more than a short time, and remember that the drawdown arithmetic in this lesson applies to every swing, not only the big crashes.
Key terms
Volatility
How widely a price swings, usually measured over days or weeks.
Drawdown
The fall from a peak to a later low.
Max drawdown
The largest such fall over a period.
Position size
How much you put into one asset.
The last crash won't size the next one
How big the next fall will be. Past drawdowns set a rough scale, not a ceiling.
How long a recovery takes. Some coins recovered in months, some took years, and many never did.
Your own risk. That depends on how much of your money is in it, not on the coin alone.
What people get wrong
Past recoveries don't guarantee future ones, especially for small coins.
Low volatility in the past few weeks doesn't mean low risk. Calm stretches often end suddenly.
Why it matters
Knowing how far a coin has fallen before helps set realistic expectations and position sizes.
Common questions
How does KryptoKap show volatility?
Portfolio X-Ray shows your 7-day swing compared with Bitcoin's, and each coin page shows the distance from its highest daily close.
Why are small coins more volatile?
Thinner markets mean a modest amount of buying or selling moves the price further, and news about a small project changes its outlook more.
Is crypto volatility going down over time?
Bitcoin's swings have generally been smaller in recent years than in its early years, as its market grew larger and deeper. That trend isn't guaranteed and smaller coins are still far more volatile. Calm stretches have often been followed by sharp moves, so recent volatility says little about the next few months.
How do I find a coin's maximum drawdown?
Open a long price chart, such as one year or longer, and find the highest close before the deepest low that followed. Divide the low by that high, subtract 1, and you have the drawdown. On KryptoKap, each coin page shows the distance from its highest daily close, which is the current drawdown.
