Crypto gainers of the month: how a price gain differs from a project's growth

The table below answers the question literally: it lists the cryptocurrencies with the largest price gain over the past month according to the platform's database, sorted by change in descending order. It measures exactly one thing — the relative change in price between the start and the end of the window. The quality of the project, the inflow of money into it, the probability that the move will continue: this criterion measures none of these and cannot measure them.

What exactly the criterion measures

A gain is a fraction: the price at the end of the period divided by the price at its start. Two properties follow from this, and they determine everything about how such a ranking behaves.

First: the criterion is dimensionless. It does not know whether a coin is expensive or cheap, whether it trades on tens of venues or on one, whether there is a working product behind it or only a page with a description. A coin with a tiny market capitalisation and a first-tier coin compete on equal terms in this sort — and the former almost always wins, because moving its price costs less.

Second: the fraction is sensitive to the starting point. The lower the price was at the start of the window, the larger the gain for the same absolute move. That is why lists of "risers of the month" regularly include assets that had fallen deeply beforehand and have recovered only part of the decline. Formally, they rose. In practice, a holder who bought before the window began is still in the red. This is not a calculation error — it is how any metric of change over a fixed window works.

Why the line-up changes every day

The window is a rolling one: it shifts together with the current date, and the starting point of the count shifts with it. When a day of sharp decline drops out of the window, a coin's gain falls by itself, without a single trade. When a day of growth drops out, the results of its neighbours in the list improve just as causelessly. So the line-up of such a table is recalculated constantly, and memorising it is pointless: a name you read today may have nothing to do with the list a week later.

This is exactly why the text names not one ticker and not one position. Any such statement in the article would be out of date before anyone had read it.

What you cannot conclude from this list

You cannot conclude that an asset is undervalued or overvalued: a change in price says nothing about the ratio of price to anything else.

You cannot conclude that the rise will continue. Sorting by gain selects assets that have already gone up — in other words, by construction it shows the past. Markets with low liquidity are prone to mean reversion: a sharp move fades more often than it continues.

You cannot conclude that money has come into the asset. A price gain can be achieved on negligible turnover if there are no offers in the order book. Volume is a separate metric, and it plays no part in this sort at all.

You cannot conclude that the leader by gain is a large or significant project. Size is measured by market capitalisation, not by gain; that is a different ranking with a different line-up, and how it is built is covered separately — what the ranking by market capitalisation measures.

Technical caveats that change the picture

Quote currency. A gain calculated in dollars and a gain calculated in roubles differ by the size of the move in the currency pair. For a Russian reader this is fundamental: a month of "growth" in dollars may turn out to be flat in roubles.

Venue of calculation. For illiquid coins the price diverges between exchanges, and an aggregated price is always somebody's average with somebody's weights.

Window boundaries. A rolling month and a calendar month give different numbers. Which boundary and which quote currency are built into the calculation of a particular row is determined by the platform's database, not by this article; if the asset's card does not state it directly, treat the parameter as unknown and do not compare the value with a figure from another source.

How to read the table step by step

Step 1 — look at the scale of the asset, not only at the gain. A gain without market capitalisation and turnover is half of the information.

Step 2 — check what happened before the window. A rebound after a collapse and a breakout to new levels look the same in the change column, yet they mean opposite things.

Step 3 — find the event. A sharp monthly move usually has a trigger: a listing, a token unlock, a protocol upgrade, a piece of infrastructure news. Triggers are to be found in the market news, and if no trigger can be found at all, that is information in itself.

Step 4 — set this against the way you intend to hold the asset. A crypto ranking is built differently from instruments with a predictable cash flow: there the result is made up of a coupon or a payout, and it can be seen in advance in the dividend calendar or in the yields of OFZ bonds. A price gain has not one component of this kind that is known in advance.

Unfamiliar terms from the table's columns are explained in the glossary.