Crypto Market Statistics and Facts: Size, Dominance, ETFs and Risk

The crypto market on 26 October 2026: $2.78 trillion across 22,507 coins

The total value of all cryptocurrencies tracked by CoinGecko stood at $2.78 trillion on 26 October 2026, measured at about 19:00 UTC. CoinGecko is a market data compiler: it collects prices from 1,518 exchanges, multiplies each price by the circulating supply of the coin and adds the results for 22,507 listed assets. Every live number on this page comes from that one dated snapshot, so the figures add up and can be compared with each other. Prices move every minute, which means the totals you see on any exchange today will differ, but the structure of the market changes far more slowly than its price level.

Bitcoin alone was worth $1.607 trillion at a price of $79,942, or 57.9 percent of the whole market. Ether followed at $282.6 billion (10.2 percent), then the dollar stablecoin Tether (USDT) at $182.3 billion. BNB, XRP, USD Coin (USDC), Solana and TRON complete the top eight. Two names in the top ten show how the list has changed: Figure Heloc, a tokenised pool of home equity loans worth $26.7 billion, and the privacy coin Zcash, which rose more than eightfold in 2025 according to CoinGecko and was worth $20.9 billion. Trading volume over the previous 24 hours was $69.1 billion.

Bitcoin outweighs the rest of the top ten combined: its $1.6 trillion market cap is 5.7 times the value of Ether and almost twice the $854 billion of the assets ranked second to tenth.

Source: CoinGecko, 26 October 2026, about 19:00 UTC. Shares are BusinessStats calculations against the $2.782 trillion total; CoinGecko rounds Bitcoin dominance to 57.9 percent using unrounded values.

Concentration is the defining feature of the market. The ten largest assets account for 88.4 percent of total value, and the top two alone for 68 percent. More than 22,000 other tokens share the remaining 11.6 percent, about $321 billion. Two of the top ten are dollar stablecoins whose price is designed to stay at one dollar, and together with smaller stablecoins they make up about 10.7 percent of the market. That matters when reading headline totals: part of the $2.78 trillion is not a speculative asset at all but tokenised cash.

Bitcoin dominance is near its highest level in five years: at 57.9 percent, Bitcoin holds a larger share of the market than at any year end since 2020, when CoinGecko measured dominance on a narrower basis.

For context against traditional assets, the whole crypto market is smaller than several individual listed companies. Our ranking of the biggest companies in the world by market value shows that the largest listed technology groups are each valued in the trillions of dollars, in the same range as the entire crypto market, and the global equity market is many times larger. Crypto is also small relative to the stock of money: the total amount of money in the world dwarfs the $297 billion of stablecoins that function as on-chain dollars.

From $180 billion in 2019 to a $4.4 trillion peak and back to $2.78 trillion

Year-end totals show how violently the market has moved. CoinGecko reported a total market cap of about $180 billion at the end of 2019 and $780 billion at the start of 2021. The 2021 boom lifted the total to $2.31 trillion by the end of that year, after a brief peak of about $3 trillion on 9 November 2021. The 2022 collapse, which included the failure of the Terra stablecoin and the FTX exchange, cut the value by 64.1 percent to $829 billion. The market then roughly doubled in each of the next two years, to $1.72 trillion at the end of 2023 and $3.40 trillion at the end of 2024.

The market is down for a second year running: after nearly doubling in 2023 and again in 2024, total value fell 10.4 percent in 2025 and a further 8.7 percent in 2026 up to 26 October.

The 2025 cycle peaked higher and turned faster. CoinGecko recorded an all time high of $4.4 trillion in early October 2025, a year in which US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $21.3 billion of net inflows. The fourth quarter then erased $946 billion, a fall of 23.7 percent, and 2025 closed at about $3.0 trillion, the first down year since 2022. The decline continued into 2026: Bitcoin was valued at about $59,100 in the accounts of the largest bitcoin ETF at 30 June 2026, and although prices recovered in the third quarter, total market value on 26 October 2026 was still 36.8 percent below the October 2025 record.

Gains and losses come in clusters: two years of gains of 97 percent or more were followed by two losing years, the same pattern that followed the 2021 boom.

Source: CoinGecko 2021, 2022, 2024 and 2025 annual reports and CoinGecko market data, 26 October 2026. Percentage changes are BusinessStats calculations.

Two features of this history are worth keeping in mind. First, a drawdown of about 72 percent followed the 2021 peak, so the current decline of about 37 percent from the record is moderate by the standards of the asset class. Second, each cycle has started from a higher base: the 2022 low of $829 billion was more than four times the 2019 level, and the 2026 market is still larger than at any year end before 2024. That pattern describes the past, not the future, and this page makes no forecast.

Bitcoin dominance has climbed from 47.8 to 57.9 percent since 2023

Bitcoin dominance, the share of total market value held by Bitcoin, is the simplest gauge of how investors are allocating within crypto. CoinGecko measured it at 47.8 percent at the end of 2023, up from 38.6 percent at the start of that year, then 54.5 percent at the end of 2024 and 57.4 percent at the end of 2025. On 26 October 2026 it stood at 57.9 percent. Rising dominance usually means money is concentrating in the largest and most liquid asset, which is also the only one with several years of exchange traded fund demand behind it.

Ether has moved the other way. Its share was 11.8 percent at the end of 2024 and 10.2 percent in the October 2026 snapshot. At $2,313, the Ether price was 53 percent below its 2025 record of $4,946 and 22 percent below its end 2025 level of $2,967, a sharper fall than Bitcoin, which was 8.7 percent below its end 2025 price of $87,520 and 36 percent below its 2025 high of $124,774.

Source: CoinGecko annual reports 2019 to 2025 and CoinGecko market data, 26 October 2026. The 2019 Bitcoin price is the 1 January 2020 value. n/a: not stated in the report for that year. CoinGecko measured dominance against the top 30 coins in its 2019 and 2020 reports, so those values are not comparable with later years.

2025 was a year when gold beat Bitcoin: gold gained 62.6 percent and US equities rose 16.6 to 20.5 percent, while Bitcoin fell 6.4 percent and Solana lost a third of its value.

The 2025 scorecard broke the idea that crypto simply tracks technology stocks. US equities rose, gold gained 62.6 percent and Bitcoin fell. Our page on gold as an investment covers the central bank buying behind that rally. Within crypto, returns were widely dispersed: BNB rose 23 percent and Zcash more than eightfold, while Solana fell 34.3 percent and Uniswap 57.5 percent. For the supply side of Bitcoin, including how miners earn fees and block rewards, see our analysis of Bitcoin mining revenue.

Stablecoins hold $297 billion, and Tether issues 61 percent of it

Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a fixed value, almost always one US dollar, backed by cash, Treasury bills or other reserves. They are the settlement currency of crypto trading and increasingly a payment tool in their own right. CoinGecko listed a combined stablecoin market cap of $296.6 billion on 26 October 2026, equal to 10.7 percent of the whole crypto market.

Tether (USDT) is by far the largest, with $182.3 billion in circulation, or 61.5 percent of all stablecoins. USD Coin (USDC), issued by Circle, follows with $71.2 billion. Together the two account for 85.5 percent of supply. The next tier is far smaller: Sky Dollar (USDS) at $10.0 billion, Ethena USDe at $4.6 billion, Dai at $4.5 billion and USD1 at $3.9 billion, followed by Global Dollar, PayPal USD and Ripple USD at between $2.6 billion and $3.1 billion each.

Nine times larger than in 2020: USDT supply grew from $20.9 billion at the end of 2020 to $187 billion at the end of 2025, then slipped 2.5 percent in 2026 as the market cooled.

Stablecoin growth has been more persistent than crypto prices. Tether supply fell only once at a year end, in 2022, and even then by 16 percent while the overall market lost 64 percent. CoinGecko reported that stablecoins grew by 48.9 percent in 2025 to $311.0 billion. The October 2026 category total of $296.6 billion is lower, but the two numbers are not fully comparable because CoinGecko revises which tokens it classifies as stablecoins; for USDT itself, the like for like decline in 2026 was 2.5 percent.

A two token market: USDT and USDC together hold 85.5 percent of all stablecoin value, and no other token reaches 4 percent.

The darker side of stablecoin growth shows up in crime data. Chainalysis estimates that stablecoins accounted for 84 percent of all illicit crypto transaction volume in 2025, largely because sanctioned entities used them to move dollars outside the banking system. New rules in the United States, the European Union and Hong Kong, covered in the regulation section below, are aimed at exactly this market. For the role of payment technology more broadly, see our fintech statistics.

The six largest US spot bitcoin ETFs held 1.17 million BTC in June 2026

The US Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first spot bitcoin exchange traded products on 10 January 2024, and trading began the next day. They quickly became the main route for institutions and wealth managers into crypto. According to CoinGecko, US spot bitcoin ETFs took in net inflows of $35.2 billion in 2024 and $21.3 billion in 2025 and held assets of $120.8 billion at the end of 2025. The fourth quarter of 2025 brought the first quarterly net outflow since launch, $1.1 billion.

The filings of the issuers themselves give the most precise view of what the funds actually hold. Quarterly reports filed with the SEC show that the six largest funds held 1,169,816 bitcoin at 30 June 2026, down from 1,262,779 at the end of 2025. That is a net reduction of about 92,960 BTC, or 7.4 percent, in six months, as redemptions exceeded new share creations while the bitcoin price fell. The holdings equal about 5.6 percent of the fixed Bitcoin supply cap of 21 million coins.

BlackRock holds almost two thirds: IBIT owned 734,261 BTC at 30 June 2026, 62.8 percent of the six fund total and more than four times the next largest fund.

Source: SEC Form 10-Q filings for the quarter ended 30 June 2026. Changes and totals are BusinessStats calculations. Net assets fell from $110.4 billion to $69.0 billion over the six months, mainly because of the lower bitcoin price.

The flows inside the largest fund show how active this market is even in a downturn. In the first half of 2026, IBIT created shares in exchange for 157,501 BTC worth $12.0 billion and redeemed shares against 192,970 BTC, and it sold a further 1,062 BTC to pay its 0.25 percent annual sponsor fee. The only one of the six to grow was the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust, the low fee version of GBTC, which added 5,805 BTC. The original GBTC lost 16.4 percent of its holdings, extending the outflows that followed its conversion to an ETF in January 2024.

Ether funds followed the bitcoin model later in 2024. The SEC approved the listing of spot ether ETFs on 23 May 2024 and trading started on 23 July 2024. CoinGecko reports that they held $17.9 billion at the end of 2025 after net inflows of $9.7 billion during the year, and that the first US spot Solana ETFs, launched in late October 2025, had gathered $948.9 million by the end of that year. For how bitcoin funds compare with the rest of the industry, see our rankings of the largest ETFs in the world, the largest ETF providers in the US and the iShares ETF business of BlackRock. The wider company story is in our BlackRock statistics.

Centralised exchanges handled $18.7 trillion of spot trading in 2025

Trading volume is the other half of market size. CoinGecko estimates that the ten largest centralised exchanges processed $18.7 trillion in spot trades in 2025, up 7.5 percent from $17.4 trillion in 2024, even though prices fell over the year. Activity peaked during the fourth quarter sell off, when average daily trading volume across the market reached $161.8 billion. Spot volume on the top ten exchanges was $4.4 trillion in that quarter and $0.9 trillion in December alone.

By late October 2026 the pace had slowed. The 24 hour volume in the CoinGecko snapshot was $69.1 billion, and about two thirds of it was in Tether, which traded $46.2 billion, against $28.5 billion for Bitcoin. That ratio is typical: most crypto trades are priced against USDT rather than against national currencies, which is why stablecoin supply is closely watched as a measure of the cash available to buy other tokens. Volume figures should be read with care, because exchange reporting standards differ and CoinGecko applies its own filters to remove suspicious activity.

About one in ten US adults used crypto in 2025, mostly as an investment

Estimates of how many people own crypto vary enormously, and many widely quoted global numbers come from exchanges or marketing surveys. This page uses only original surveys run by public bodies and independent research organisations. The most robust is the Federal Reserve Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), which asks a representative sample of US adults each October whether they used cryptocurrency in the previous twelve months.

In the October 2025 survey of 12,934 adults, 9 percent said they bought cryptocurrency or held it as an investment, 2 percent used it to buy something or make a payment and 1 percent used it to send money to friends or family. Usage has moved with prices. Any use stood at 12 percent in 2021, fell to 10 percent in 2022 and 7 percent in 2023, then recovered. Investment remains the dominant purpose by a wide margin; payments did not exceed 2 percent of adults in any year shown.

Crypto is held, not spent: in every year shown at least four times as many Americans used crypto as an investment as used it to pay for something.

The SHED data also show who uses crypto for payments. In 2023, adults with family income below $25,000 were four times as likely as higher income adults to use crypto for transactions (4 percent against 1 percent), while investment use rose with income, from 4 percent below $25,000 to 8 percent at $100,000 or more. In 2025, people who paid with crypto most often did so because the person receiving the money preferred it (26 percent), for faster transfers (19 percent) or for privacy (17 percent); only 7 percent said they did not trust banks.

The Pew Research Center asks a broader question: whether a person has ever invested in, traded or used cryptocurrency. In its February 2024 survey of 10,133 US adults, 17 percent said yes, statistically unchanged from 16 percent in 2021. The gap between men and younger adults and everyone else is large: 42 percent of men aged 18 to 29 and 36 percent of men aged 30 to 49 had used crypto, compared with 17 and 15 percent of women in the same age groups.

Young men dominate crypto use: men under 30 are two and a half times as likely as the average American to have used cryptocurrency.

Trust remains low. In the same Pew survey, 63 percent of Americans said they were not very or not at all confident that current ways to invest in, trade or use crypto are reliable and safe, and only 5 percent were extremely or very confident. Among those who had used crypto, 38 percent said their investments had done worse than expected, an improvement from 45 percent a year earlier.

In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority tracks ownership through its own consumer research. Its 2025 wave, fielded from 5 August to 2 September 2025, found that 8 percent of UK adults owned crypto, down from 12 percent in 2024, even though awareness stayed at 91 percent. Holdings are getting larger rather than more widespread: small positions of 100 pounds or less declined, while 21 percent of holders had between 1,001 and 5,000 pounds. Bitcoin was held by 57 percent of crypto owners and Ether by 43 percent, and the most common reason for buying was as part of a wider investment portfolio (33 percent), ahead of treating it as a gamble (30 percent).

Taken together, the surveys describe a minority asset. Between one in twelve and one in ten adults in the United States and the United Kingdom hold crypto at any one time, and most of them treat it as an investment rather than as money. For how household wealth is distributed more broadly, see our data on millionaires in the US.

Americans reported $11.4 billion in crypto fraud losses to the FBI in 2025

The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) collects complaints from victims in the United States. Its 2025 report recorded 1,008,597 complaints and total reported losses of $20.9 billion. Cryptocurrency was involved in 181,565 complaints and $11.37 billion of losses, 54 percent of all reported internet crime losses. That was up from $9.3 billion in 2024 and about $5.6 billion in 2023. The biggest category is investment fraud with a crypto link, which includes so called pig butchering schemes and cost victims $7.2 billion in 2025 against $5.8 billion a year earlier.

Losses doubled in two years: reported crypto fraud rose from about $5.6 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, and crypto now accounts for more than half of all internet crime losses reported to the FBI.

Older Americans carry a disproportionate share. People aged 60 and over reported $4.43 billion in crypto losses in 2025, up from $2.84 billion in 2024 and $1.65 billion in 2023. Crypto ATMs, also called kiosks, are a growing channel: complaints rose to 13,460 with losses of $389 million in 2025, compared with 10,956 complaints and $246.7 million in 2024. These are reported losses only; many victims never file a complaint.

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis measures crime from the other side, by tracing funds received by addresses linked to illicit activity. In its 2026 Crypto Crime Report it estimated that illicit addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, a record and 162 percent more than its revised 2024 estimate of $57.2 billion. The jump was driven mainly by sanctioned entities, whose receipts rose 694 percent; a single ruble backed stablecoin, A7A5, processed more than $93.3 billion in its first year. Even so, Chainalysis puts illicit activity at below 1 percent of all attributed on-chain volume.

Sources: Chainalysis 2026 Crypto Crime Report (introduction 8 January 2026, scams 13 January 2026, stolen funds 18 December 2025); FBI IC3 Internet Crime Reports 2024 and 2025. The measures overlap and must not be added together. The 2024 North Korea value is implied by the reported 2025 total and increase.

Theft is concentrated in a few very large attacks. Chainalysis counts more than $3.4 billion stolen in 2025, of which North Korea linked hackers took at least $2.02 billion, including the $1.5 billion compromise of the Bybit exchange in February 2025, the largest single crypto theft recorded. Attacks on individuals are rising in number: personal wallet thefts reached 158,000 incidents affecting at least 80,000 victims, although the value stolen from individuals fell to $713 million. Scammers also became more efficient, with the average payment to a scam rising from $782 in 2024 to $2,764 in 2025, and scams with links to AI tool vendors earned about 4.5 times more than others.

From ETF approvals to stablecoin laws: the rules that reshaped crypto since 2023

Regulation has changed more in the last three years than in the previous decade. In the United States the shift has been from enforcement actions to dedicated legislation and product approvals; in the European Union, from national regimes to a single licence under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The table lists the milestones with the largest effect on the market data above.

Sources: EUR-Lex (MiCA, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114), SEC statements of 10 January 2024 and 17 September 2025, Congress.gov (S.1582 GENIUS Act), White House executive order of 6 March 2025, Chainalysis (A7A5 sanctions). The CLARITY Act had not become law at the time of this update.

Three of these milestones explain most of the market structure seen today. The ETF approvals created a regulated channel whose six largest funds held more than 1.1 million bitcoin in June 2026. The GENIUS Act set reserve, disclosure and licensing rules for dollar stablecoins in the United States, and MiCA set comparable rules in Europe; both favour large issuers that can meet them. The September 2025 generic listing standards removed the need for a separate rule change for each new commodity based crypto ETF, and the first US spot Solana funds followed a month later. The broader policy context, including how central banks view stablecoins and digital currencies, is covered in our page on central banks and in our money topic overview.

Five things that change how crypto statistics should be read

Market cap is price times supply, not money invested. A token with a small amount of trading can carry a large market cap if its whole supply is valued at the last traded price. The $2.78 trillion total is therefore a mark to market value, not the amount of cash that has flowed into crypto or that could be withdrawn at that price.

Different compilers give different totals. CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap and other data providers list different sets of coins and apply different rules to circulating supply, so totals for the same day can differ. This page uses CoinGecko throughout for market data so that the snapshot, the shares and the history are internally consistent. Company rankings by market capitalisation follow similar logic, but company share counts are audited, while token supply is self reported or read from the blockchain.

Stablecoins and tokenised assets are included. Roughly $297 billion of the total is dollar stablecoins, and new categories such as tokenised loans and tokenised stocks now appear in the rankings. These assets behave differently from Bitcoin or Ether and inflate the total without adding price risk.

Ownership surveys measure different things. The Federal Reserve asks about use in the past twelve months, Pew asks whether a person has ever used crypto, and the FCA asks UK adults whether they currently own it. Figures from exchanges, which count accounts rather than people, are not used here because one person can hold many accounts.

Crime numbers are lower bounds. Chainalysis revises earlier years upward as it identifies more illicit addresses, which is why its 2024 estimate rose from $40.9 billion to $57.2 billion. FBI data count only losses that victims reported. Neither should be read as the full size of crypto crime. Readers interested in how the money supply and liquidity conditions shape speculative assets can compare these figures with our M1 money supply data.

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