Liquidity grade

The liquidity grade is a single letter from A+ to F that shows how easily a coin can be bought or sold — in what size, how quickly, and with how little price impact. The grade appears on each coin's “Where to buy” tab (e.g. in the coins catalogue → markets tab). It is Holder.io's own methodology and metric — we compute it ourselves from open market data.

The metric's whole job is to not be fooled by fake volume. Reported trading volume in crypto is cheap to fake (more on that below), so we don't take it at face value — we cross-check it against something that is expensive to fake: the number of independent major exchanges that actually list the coin.

What liquidity is, and why a letter

Liquidity is a market's ability to absorb your trade: how much of an asset you can buy or sell, how fast, and at what price concession. BTC has enormous liquidity — millions of dollars move with barely a price wobble. A micro-cap token is the opposite: even a small sell knocks the price down. Liquidity is measured most precisely from the order book (depth, slippage), but that data is heavy and absent from an open daily snapshot. So we grade from what is reliably available and reduce it to a plain letter rather than a falsely-precise number.

The two factors

The grade combines two things — how much the coin is traded, and on how many serious venues.

Factor V — volume (market depth)

24-hour USD trading volume is the best available proxy for market depth. But coins' volumes differ by billions of times ($40B for leaders vs a couple of dollars for dead tokens), so the scale is logarithmic: the order of magnitude matters, not the exact figure. Thresholds are absolute (in dollars), not a “rank in a list”: a coin trading $100M is liquid regardless of whether the market around it grew. That keeps the letter stable — it doesn't jump just because something else nearby rallied.

Factor B — breadth (how many exchanges list it)

The second factor is how many of the most reputable exchanges on our curated list (about 30) actually let you buy the coin, with real volume. This is the anti-wash anchor: reported volume is cheap to fake, but listings across many independent major exchanges are not. So volume alone cannot “buy” a high grade — breadth is required too. Only genuine markets count (the coin is the base of the pair, volume ≥ $1), consistent with the coverage block on the coin's page.

How this set of exchanges is chosen. We deliberately don't rely on a third party's automatic ranking (CoinGecko's is recomputed weekly, graded on a curve versus peers, and periodically rebuilt — which would reshuffle our set even when a coin's listings don't change) and don't rank by volume (that would pull in exactly the wash-heavy venues). Instead we maintain our own curated list of reputable exchanges, built from objective, hard-to-fake, slow-moving signals: holding a regulatory license (MiCA, BitLicense, MAS, VARA, FCA, Japan FSA, etc.), operational longevity, presence on ≥2 independent reputable rankings (CCData, Bitwise/Messari, Kaiko), and published Proof-of-Reserves. The list is reviewed quarterly and frozen between reviews; volume and pair count are only a secondary tie-break, and user reviews are excluded from the definition. So a coin's breadth changes only when the coin actually gains or loses a listing, not when an external score wobbles. External rankings (CoinGecko, CCData) are used as a cross-check, not as the definition.

The composite score and letter

The two factors combine with weights — volume leads (it is the only depth proxy), but breadth is nearly its equal so that volume alone can't produce an inflated score:

Score = 0.55 × V + 0.45 × B

The score (0–100) maps to a letter. We publish the letter only — a precise “73.4 out of 100” would imply we measured order-book slippage, which we do not.

Fake-volume (wash-trading) risk signals

Wash trading is artificial trades — essentially selling to yourself — to paint a large volume and make a coin look active. In crypto it is widespread: Bitwise's 2019 presentation to the SEC estimated that about 95% of reported Bitcoin spot volume was fake, and academic work (Cong, Li, Tang & Yang, “Crypto Wash Trading”) puts average volume inflation on unregulated exchanges at more than 70%.

You cannot directly “catch” wash from aggregate data — that needs trade-level data (trade-size distributions, Benford's-law tests, and so on), which we don't have. So we don't detect fake volume; we surface risk signals in three ways:

• Breadth as the defence (primary). Because 45% of the letter is the count of serious exchanges, fake volume on a couple of venues structurally cannot reach an A. To earn a high grade a coin must genuinely list on many independent exchanges — and that is expensive to fake.
• Hard cap for concentrated wash. If turnover (volume ÷ market cap) is above 2 and the coin trades on fewer than 5 top exchanges, the grade is capped at C and marked “volume may be inflated”. That is the classic wash pattern: implausible volume on a few venues.
• Soft flag for extreme turnover. If turnover is above 3 (the entire market cap “trades over” more than 3× in a day) at any breadth, we show a caveat “turnover N% of market cap, volume may be inflated”, but we do not cut the grade: a coin on many serious exchanges has earned its breadth; we simply flag the signal honestly.

Why turnover. Turnover (volume ÷ market cap) shows what fraction of a coin churns in a day. Accepted rules of thumb: below ~1% is a thin market; roughly 2–10% is healthy activity; above ~10% is high interest (either a real catalyst or a reason to look closer); and turnover above 100%/day on a small cap is a classic wash red flag (TradingView's own “volume/market cap” docs read it the same way). Our thresholds (hard cap at turnover above 2 with fewer than 5 venues; soft flag above 3) are deliberately stricter than that folk heuristic and always work together with breadth — so a legitimately busy large-cap isn't caught. Turnover is a downgrade-and-warn signal only — never a reason to raise a grade.

Honesty caps

Beyond the wash logic above, the score is additionally capped wherever we cannot vouch for the volume:

• Single venue. If only one top exchange lists the coin, the grade is no higher than C: single-venue volume cannot be cross-checked.
• Almost nowhere. If none of the top-30 list it and there are ≤ 2 venues in total, the grade is no higher than D.
• Spread (the gap between buy and sell prices) is not part of the score: ours is noisy and has no anomaly flag, so relying on it would be dishonest.

What the metric does NOT do

To avoid a false impression, the limits matter:

• It does not detect wash directly: statistical tests (Benford's first-digit law, clustering of “round” trade sizes, the shape of the power-law tail) require trade-level data we don't have — it only signals the risk.
• It does not measure order-book depth or slippage (CoinMarketCap's approach) — it can't catch depth that is posted and instantly pulled.
• It does not normalise volume by an exchange's web traffic (CoinGecko's approach) — it can't strip inflation inside a given exchange.
• It works on the aggregate: if a reputable exchange itself games its volume, we won't see that separately.

And, honestly, on the weak spots: breadth can lag genuine new listings — a good new coin isn't on many exchanges at once, so the caps may temporarily under-rate a legitimately new asset; and aggregate volume can in principle be inflated inside a single exchange too. Of the two errors, we deliberately choose the cautious rating over the inflated one.

Key parameters