How to Value a Crypto Asset
Crypto prices are quoted everywhere and valued almost nowhere. This guide states how Crypto Studio values a crypto asset: when a fair value is printed and when one is refused, how the Token DCF is built, what the multiples, the cost band, and the signals actually measure, and how to read every view. The guide is complete on its own and remains free.
What Crypto Studio Does
Crypto Studio is a valuation tool for crypto assets. It covers fifty curated assets, and for each one it builds a single workup that brings three things together: a value worked from the asset's own numbers, the market's signals, and the risk. The three belong on one page, because a price read without the other two invites the wrong conclusion.
Assets are found by name or symbol from any view, and every figure on a workup carries its source and its date. The discipline runs through the whole tool: a figure prints only when its inputs are on record. Where an input is missing, the view names the missing input instead of filling the gap with an estimate.
Crypto Studio is live. This guide describes the tool as it stands, and it is complete on its own.
The Workup
Open any asset, from the board, the dashboard, the compare view, or search, and the workup opens on the answer. The top band is the readout. Under it, a short reading states in plain words what the numbers say, and the panels below carry the detail: the price chart, the valuation lenses, fees and revenue, supply and dilution, signals, and risk.
The readout band takes two forms. Where a fair value exists, it shows four tiles: the fair value with its confidence label, the fair value against the price as a percent, the Buy price at the required margin, and the verdict. Where no fair value exists, it shows the price, the headline lens, the dilution, and the drawdown from the all-time high. No verdict tile appears in the second form.
Every workup returns to the view it was opened from, so a reader moving down a board list keeps the list.
The Price Chart
The chart carries the asset's full daily price history. Two averages run with the price: the 200-day average, and the 200-week average where the history supports it. A line marks the all-time high. On Bitcoin, markers note each halving, the event that halves the new supply on a four-year rhythm.
On an asset with a fair value, the fair value draws as a line of its own, so the gap between value and price is visible across the whole history rather than stated once.
Charts export as images (PNG). The Studio does not hand out the raw price series behind a chart; the computed statistics on the page are the product.
How the Headline Is Chosen
One rule decides what stands at the top of each workup: a fair value and a verdict are printed only where a value model genuinely applies. Everything else gets the strongest honest reading its data supports, named for what it is.
A token with documented revenue that reaches its holders gets the Token DCF: a fair value, a Buy price, and a verdict. A smart-contract platform gets a multiples reading, its price against its fees, set against its own history and its peers. Bitcoin gets the cost-of-production band and its signals; no intrinsic value model applies to Bitcoin, and the page says so plainly.
Tokens for infrastructure, exchanges, and governance get a multiples reading where fee data exists, and signals alone where it does not. A meme token carries the words "No reliable value". A stablecoin gets a stand-aside card: the record of its peg, stated in full, with the limits of that record stated beside it.
The Token DCF in Plain Language
The Token DCF values the cash that actually reaches token holders: the share of a protocol's revenue paid out to holders, sent to buybacks or burns, or paid to stakers, as documented for each asset. It follows the same shape as the stock DCF in Stock Valuation Studio, so the structure is familiar.
The base is the trailing 365 days of that holders' revenue. The projection runs ten years in two stages. The first five years grow at the measured trailing growth rate, held between zero and 40 percent. The next five fade in a straight line to the terminal growth of 3 percent.
The discount rate is 20 percent. That is far above the rate used for stocks, and the page prints the reason: smart-contract risk, regulatory risk, governance risk, and token-design risk are all real, and the rate is where they are charged. The rate is editable, and a sensitivity grid shows the value across growth and discount rates from 12 to 30 percent.
The result is divided by the projected circulating supply in year five, not by today's supply. A token that will mint heavily over five years is worth less per token today, and the division is where that dilution lands. The year-five supply follows a documented schedule where one exists, and otherwise a straight line to the supply cap.
Three scenarios stand beside the base case. The bear case cuts growth by 20 points and adds 5 points to the discount rate; the bull case adds 10 points of growth and takes 3 points off the rate. An editor on the page changes the growth, the discount rate, and the required margin, and the readout recomputes on the page, marked as edited, with one reset back to the standard assumptions.
Every fair value carries a confidence label, and for crypto the label is never High. It reads Low when any of three tests fail: the revenue record covers under 24 months, the three largest months supply more than 40 percent of the trailing year, or governance can switch the flow to holders off at will. Otherwise it reads Medium, and the workup states the reasons in words.
Two assets carry a fair value today. At the end of October 2026, on revenue through October 30, the engine valued Hyperliquid at $3.64, with a Buy price of $3.10, against a market price near $88; and Aave at $6.76, with a Buy price of $5.75, against a price near $133. Both pages read Overvalued, and both carry Low confidence, Aave on all three tests and Hyperliquid on two. The figures move as revenue, supply, and prices move; the workup always shows the current computation, with every input and its date.
Fees, Revenue, and Value Locked
The fundamentals panel shows three money figures for each asset. Fees are what users paid the protocol. Revenue is the share the protocol kept. Holders' revenue is the share that reached token holders, the figure the Token DCF values.
Each figure is shown on two bases: the last 30 days and the trailing 365 days, counted over complete days only. A partial day at the edge of a window would move the total by more than the day is worth, so it is never counted. Where the 30-day pace runs at more than three times the yearly pace, the panel shows the yearly figure as primary and flags the spike, because a single strong month annualizes into a misleading multiple.
Total value locked is the dollar value deposited in the protocol. On a platform asset the figure is the chain's, and the panel labels it as the chain's, not the asset's.
The multiples lenses divide the market cap by these figures: price to fees, price to revenue, price to holders' revenue, fully diluted value to revenue, and market cap to value locked. Each lens is read two ways. Against the asset's own two-year history, the current multiple carries a percentile: under the 20th percentile reads Cheap against its own range, the middle reads Typical, and above the 80th reads Rich. Against its peers, the lens stands beside the peer median. A multiple whose fees or revenue are at or below zero prints Not meaningful, never a negative number.
Supply and Dilution
Every workup carries the supply panel. It states the circulating supply, the total supply, and the maximum supply where a cap exists, each with its source.
The fully diluted value is the price times the maximum supply, or the total supply where no cap exists. Divided by the market cap, it gives the dilution ratio. Above two, the panel flags Significant future supply: most of the asset's eventual tokens are still to come, and today's price is being paid for a much smaller float.
The annual issuance rate is computed from the Studio's own daily snapshots once a year of them exists. Until then the panel says the history is building, with the date it completes. Bitcoin is the exception: its issuance is exact from the block subsidy, and its panel shows the halving countdown in blocks and in an estimated date.
Bitcoin: The Network Panel and the Cost Band
Bitcoin's workup carries a network panel: the hashrate and its seven-day average, the difficulty and the last adjustment, the next adjustment with its projected change, the block subsidy, fees as a share of miner revenue, the size of the mempool, current fee rates, and the halving countdown.
Under it stands the cost-of-production band: an estimate of what it costs miners to produce one bitcoin. The method is arithmetic, and every input is printed. The network's energy use per day comes from the hashrate and the mining fleet's efficiency. The electricity cost of one bitcoin is that energy, priced, divided by the bitcoin issued per day. The all-in cost divides the electricity cost by electricity's share of total cost, set at 70 percent.
Three cases give the band. Fleet efficiency runs 15, 22, and 30 joules per terahash, and electricity runs four, five, and seven cents per kilowatt-hour, for the low, base, and high cases. Every assumption is editable on the page, and one reset restores the standard set. Edits recompute on the page only and are never saved back.
The band is an estimate built on assumptions, and the page says so. It is not a fair value. Its use is as a floor zone with a history: the readout states the price as a multiple of the base case. On October 31, 2026, the band read $48,947 low, $89,736 base, and $171,315 high, with the price at 0.86 times the base case.
Signals and Risk
The signals panel describes where the price stands against the asset's own history. It shows the drawdown from the all-time high, with the high's date; the Mayer Multiple, the price divided by its 200-day average, with the multiple's percentile against its own history; the distance from the 200-week average on Bitcoin and Ethereum; the trend, price above both averages, between them, or below both; the 14-day RSI with its 30 and 70 guides; and realized volatility over 30 and 90 days.
A signal is a description, never a recommendation. The panel prints where a figure stands and stops there.
The risk panel carries the statistics of the full history: the compound annual growth rate, volatility annualized on a 365-day year because crypto trades every day, the maximum drawdown and the time it took to recover, the Sharpe and Sortino ratios at a 4 percent risk-free rate, the best and worst months, the count of positive months, the value of $10,000 held across the history, and the beta and correlation against Bitcoin and against the S&P 500 on aligned dates.
The Board, the Dashboard, and Compare
The board lists all fifty assets on one table. Every column sorts, and a figure that is not on record sorts last, never as a zero. Filters narrow the list by category, by asset type, by the form of the reading, by holders' revenue and its growth, by drawdown, by volatility, and by trend. A filter whose inputs are not on record shows as a disabled control naming the missing input, rather than filtering on a substitute.
A watchlist is kept in the browser, on the reader's own device. From the board, up to eight assets can be sent to the compare view in one action.
Compare lines up two to eight assets. Its chart indexes every asset to 100 at the start of the chosen window, on the crypto calendar: crypto trades every day, and where a stock index stands beside it, the dates are aligned and the method is stated on the page. The statistics table below spans performance, risk, supply, the state of each multiple, and a fair value where one exists. Verdicts appear only for assets that carry one.
The dashboard opens the Studio. It shows the whole-market figures, total market cap and the Bitcoin and Ethereum shares of it, each with its source and its time; the two fair values in their context; the top movers over 24 hours and seven days; the top fee earners; performance by category; DeFi value locked by chain; and a stablecoin tile carrying each tracked stablecoin's deviation from its peg. If a tracked stablecoin holds outside its peg band for over an hour, a banner on the dashboard says so.
Data Sources
Prices, market caps, supplies, and ranks come from CoinMarketCap. Price and market data by CoinMarketCap. The daily price history comes from CoinMarketCap as well: at launch each asset carries the trailing twelve months of daily closes, so the averages, the drawdown, and the risk figures are computed over the span the chart shows, and the workup states that span. The Bitcoin network figures come from mempool.space. Charts are drawn with the TradingView Lightweight Charts library, credited under every chart.
Fees, revenue, holders' revenue, and value locked are not served at launch: no licensed source for them is in place yet, and the Studio prints nothing in their place. When a licensed source lands, those panels and the fair values built on them switch on, and this chapter will name the source.
Every view names its sources and the time its figures stand at. Windows run over complete days, and the daily close is taken at the end of the UTC day.
Limits
A fair value exists only where revenue reaching holders is documented and measured. For most assets no such flow exists, and the Studio prints a reading or a stand-aside instead of inventing one. That restraint is the product's central choice.
Holders' revenue is a policy of each protocol's governance, and governance can change it or switch it off. The confidence label carries that fact on every fair value it touches, and a fair value should be read with its label, never without it.
A multiples reading is relative: it says where an asset stands against its own history and its peers, not what the asset is worth. The cost band rests on stated assumptions about the mining fleet and the price of electricity, and moves when they are edited. Signals describe the past path of a price; they do not predict its next one.
Some models are deliberately not offered. Stock-to-flow is excluded: its predictions failed, and printing it would cost the Studio its credibility. Price targets are not offered. The on-chain cost-basis ratios, such as MVRV, are excluded because no free source for their data is licensed for this use.