How to read a crypto bubble chart
A bubble chart compresses a market of hundreds of coins into one picture. Two properties carry all of it: how big a circle is, and what color it is. This page explains both precisely — including the exact thresholds this chart uses — and then the parts of the market the picture leaves out.
- Size — market cap
- Price times circulating supply — $14.4B for Hyperliquid today.
- Color — price change
- Green up, red down, brightness for how big the move was. HYPE moved +1.61% over the last 24 hours.
- Label — logo, ticker and change
- Which coin it is, and the same change repeated as a number. Bubbles too small to hold the stack are left blank rather than shrunk past reading size.
01 Size
Size is market cap, on a compressed scale
Market cap is the last traded price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation. That is the number the size of a bubble is built from.
It is not built from it directly. On today's board the largest coin is about 4,789× the size of the smallest, and a chart that mapped that range onto radius one-to-one would be a single enormous circle surrounded by dust. So the radius comes from the logarithm of market cap, and the compressed result is then stretched back out a little — this chart raises it to the power of 2.5 — so that neighbors stay distinguishable instead of collapsing into identical dots.
Two consequences worth carrying with you.
Read size as rank, not as ratio
A circle twice as wide is not twice the market cap. It is not a fixed multiple of anything, because the mapping depends on the range of coins currently on screen. Size answers "is this a large coin or a small one", and it answers that well. It does not answer "how many times larger".
The same coin can be a different size on a different chart
Market cap depends on circulating supply, and circulating supply is partly a reporting decision — data providers count locked, burned and treasury tokens differently. Two bubble charts disagreeing about the size of a mid-cap coin are usually disagreeing about its supply, not about its price.
02 Color
Color is the price change, brightness is how big
Hue gives you direction: green up, red down. Brightness gives you magnitude. That second half is where most bubble charts, including copies of this one, quietly mislead people.
A 10% move in a day is a large day. A 10% move across a year is nothing. If a chart uses one fixed color scale for every timeframe, short periods come out uniformly dark and long periods come out uniformly saturated — and in both cases color stops carrying information. So the scale changes with the period. These are the thresholds this chart ships with:
| Period | Full color at | Neutral below |
|---|---|---|
| 15 minutes | ±1.5% | ±0.0075% |
| 1 hour | ±3% | ±0.015% |
| 4 hours | ±5% | ±0.025% |
| 24 hours | ±10% | ±0.05% |
| 7 days | ±20% | ±0.1% |
| 30 days | ±40% | ±0.2% |
| 1 year | ±120% | ±0.6% |
Between zero and the full-color threshold, brightness follows a square-root curve rather than a straight line — middling moves lift away from the dark end instead of crowding into it.
Two practical readings fall out of that table. First, a fully saturated bubble means something different depending on the period you are looking at: over 24 hours it means a 10% day, over a year it means the coin has more than doubled. Second, grey is rarer than people expect — only a move under half a percent of the period's own scale renders neutral. A quiet day therefore looks like a dark board rather than a colorless one: almost everything moves a little, and a little still has a direction.
03 Period
Why a coin is green over a day and red over a year
Because both are true. A percentage change is measured from a starting point. Move the starting point and the answer moves with it. This is arithmetic, not a contradiction, and there is no period that is the "real" one.
Here is what that looks like right now — the same coins, three periods, the same color rules applied to each:
| Coin | 24h | 30d | 1y |
|---|---|---|---|
| LEOUNUS SED LEO | +7.79% | -4.20% | -1.10% |
| ZECZcash | -1.09% | -9.29% | +1239.41% |
| LTCLitecoin | +0.41% | -2.85% | -62.85% |
| XAUtTether Gold | -0.07% | +9.43% | +30.39% |
| OKBOKB | -2.62% | +29.22% | +11.48% |
| PAXGPAX Gold | -0.04% | +9.99% | +31.21% |
Right now, 11 of the 89 coins on the board with a full year of price history are up over 24 hours and down over the year.
The habit worth building is to pick the period from the question:
"What happened today?"
24 hours. It is what most boards open on, and it is the only period that answers a question about today.
"Is this a bounce or a trend?"
Flip between 24 hours and 30 days on the same board. A green day inside a red month looks completely different from a green day inside a green month, and the flip takes a second.
"How did this actually do?"
A year. Long periods flatten out the noise that dominates short ones.
One caveat on the longest period: a coin younger than a year has no yearly number at all. It shows up blank rather than as zero, here and in the app. A zero would be a claim the data does not support.
04 Size and liquidity
A big bubble is not an easy buy
Size on a bubble chart is a headline number. It is not a measure of how much of the coin you could actually trade at the price shown, and the gap between those two things is the most expensive misreading of any market map.
Market cap is not money invested
If a token has a billion units outstanding and the last trade happened at two dollars, its market cap prints two billion dollars — even if that last trade was for fifty dollars' worth. Nobody put two billion into it. Market cap is a multiplication.
Market cap is not liquidity
A coin can carry a billion-dollar cap and an order book thin enough that selling a few hundred thousand dollars of it moves the price several percent. The chart has no way to show order-book depth, and a bubble drawn from a thin market looks exactly like a bubble drawn from a deep one.
Circulating supply is a snapshot, not a schedule
Many tokens circulate a fraction of their eventual supply, with the rest released over years to a team, to early investors or to a treasury. Two identical bubbles can mean very different things when one of them is about to double the number of units in existence.
The most useful column next to any bubble chart is 24-hour volume. It is the cheapest available check on whether a move means anything: a 300% gain on twenty thousand dollars of volume tells you one participant did something, not that a market changed its mind.
05 Views
Bubbles, heatmap or list
The same two numbers — size and change — can be drawn three ways, and each is better at a different question.
Bubbles
Circles float with gaps between them, and area carries the size. Best for the shape of a session: whether a move is the whole market or three coins, whether the large caps and the long tail are going the same way, whether something unfamiliar is suddenly large and bright. Worst for precise comparison — two circles a few percent apart in area look identical.
Heatmap
The same data as rectangles packed to fill the frame with no gaps. Rectangles share edges, so sizes that are close are much easier to rank by eye, and more names fit in the same space. This is the view for comparing rather than scanning.
List
Exact numbers, sortable, no visual encoding at all. If you are going to write a figure down or act on it, read it here. A bubble is a bad way to read a value and a worse way to compare two values that are close together.
Bubbles to notice something, the heatmap to compare it, the list to check it.
06 Limits
What a bubble chart doesn't show
Every market map is a compression, and it is worth knowing exactly what got compressed out. No amount of staring at a bubble chart will tell you:
Liquidity
As above: size and tradability are unrelated properties, and only one of them is on the chart.
Tokenomics
Emission schedule, unlock cliffs, how concentrated the holdings are. A chart that draws two coins the same size has no opinion on whether one of them releases a fifth of its supply next quarter.
Why the price moved
A green circle looks the same whether the cause was a product launch, an index rebalance, an exchange listing, a short squeeze or a coordinated pump in a group chat. The chart reports the result and is silent about the cause — and that silence is usually filled by whoever benefits from the story you end up believing.
Anything about the future
Worth stating plainly, because the visual works against it: green means the price went up, not that it will go up. Every chart that ranks things by recent performance invites the opposite reading, and bubbles are unusually good at it, because a big bright circle feels like an argument.
07 In practice
Reading a board in thirty seconds
- Start with the largest circles. They are most of the market's capitalization; if they are green, "the market is up" is a fair summary.
- Read brightness, not the presence of color. Dark green everywhere is a quiet up day, not a rally.
- Flip the period once. Today against 30 days is the fastest way to see whether you are looking at a bounce or a trend.
- Check volume before believing an unfamiliar name at the top of a gainers list. Thin markets produce spectacular percentages.
- Then stop. A market map is for orientation. Anything you intend to act on should be read as a number, not as a circle.
Written by the developer of Crypto Heatmap, a bubble chart for iOS, Android and the web. The figures on this page are a real capture of the market, taken at the time stamped on the front page. The color thresholds in section 02 are the constants the app ships with — not a description of how such charts generally work.