Beyond Price: Why We Need a Better Way to Value Crypto Assets

The most commonly cited number for comparing the worth of different crypto projects is market capitalization.

Because it's benchmarked in dollars, this measure implicitly judges the success of each crypto project in terms of some expected future fiat currency "Exit."

The day traders and YouTube advisors, ubiquitous as they are, do not hold a monopoly over crypto culture.

More than any other type of asset, crypto tokens are defined by the communities they attract: ad hoc collectives of individuals motivated by a freely formed belief in an idea, a unique proposition for decentralizing an economic ecosystem.

Not only does it use a more relevant crypto benchmark than the dollar - bitcoin - it also downplays the significance of price itself as a measure of value.

The Explorer offers a weighted, multi-dimensional representation of value incorporating a variety of objective measures of engagement and interest in each crypto project.

By the bitcoin benchmark-based terms of the Crypto Explorer itself, community development is an important factor in any crypto project's value, and social media is a relevant proxy for that.

No. Not because the dollar prices of crypto assets tanked last week and we need some other, non-price distraction, but because institutional investors are on the verge of entering the market and it's vital that they set aside their dollar-centric valuation models and recognize that value is a different concept in the crypto world.

These new big players talk about crypto as "a new asset class" - as if crypto tokens are just an alternative store of value, not too dissimilar to a stock, bond or commodity, that will one day bring them dollar returns when they cash out back into fiat.

What they're really "Buying" by investing in a crypto token is exposure to the whims of a community who've formed around a core idea.