P2P, MOE, CMC, CS, TS & MCAP Explained

Welcome to Crypto Jargon, the series where I’m breaking down some of the most commonly used terms and acronyms in reference to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

Today I will look into the following terms and how they are used in market analysis on soical media, forums and even in mainstream media articles.
P2P, MOE, CMC, MCAP, CS, TS, MS,

Let’s start with the most obvious one P2P which stands for Peer to Peer.

For foreign English speakers, it may not be so obvious, but peer is just another word for a person, so the term literally means from person to person, indicating that a transaction or information is being transmitted directly from one person to another without the need or use of a third party interference.
This is what most cryptocurrency networks are referred to – as being peer to peer, meaning that the users can interact with each other uninterrupted and unobserved by a third party. This of course, doesn’t include transactions on exchanges or cloud wallets, where the company who runs that service is in fact a third party, but in their essence, cryptocurrencies offer the liberty to make direct peer to peer transactions should one wish to do so.

Moving on to the next one, MOE stands for medium of exchange – it’s kinda self-explanatory, this means that a certain digital asset has the qualities to be used as a medium of exchange, which is one of the qualities of money.
Digital currencies in fact offer more than just monetary value, they are information, digital data that can transmit not only transactional data but any kind of digital data really.
Anyway, currently they are mostly used as medium of exchange and store of value (in the case of Bitcoin for instance).

Next on my list is CS – circulating supply: this is the amount of cryptocurrency units (coins or tokens) that are already mined or issued and are currently circulating on the market.
It does not include units that are yet to be mined or held or burnt.

For Example: Bitcoin’s circulating supply currently is 18 million out of a total 21 million coins.
This total by the way, 21 million, is called Total Supply (TS) or Maximum Supply (MS) which for every cryptocurrency is different.
For Litecoin for instance, it is 84 million coins while for Ripple it’s 100 billion coins.
Some coins are mineable so their total supply is distributed over a long period of time. The last fraction of Bitcoin for instance will be mined in the distant future in 2140, while when it comes to Ripple or any of the ERC20 tokens, they are pre-mined, so their supply can be distributed from the start, or in some cases periodically, in a few stages so that the market does not get over-saturated as is the case with Ripple.

Next one on my list is Mcap – which stands for Market Capitalisation or market cap for short.
This is not a strictly crypto term but it’s borrowed from the traditional markets like stocks for instance where the market capitalisation is calculated by multiplying a company’s number of shares by the current market price of one share of that company.

For cryptocurrencies it is calculated by multiplying the total supply of the cryptocurrency by the current price of an individual unit of that cryptocurrency and that makes the total value, the total market cap of that cryptocurrency.

And lastly, CMC is the abbreviation for CoinMarketCap, the website I used in the screenshot above – this is the database that most of the investors and traders of cryptocurrencies use to see quick statistics about the coins currently available to the public. Every respectable coin has to be listed on that database and you can see a lot of information there, like the current price, its market cap, circulating supply, maximum supply, price change over the last 24hrs, the volume traded, the exchanges that trade it, also the official website and social media links, the explorer where you can track the progress of certain transactions on that blockchain, wallets and much much more. There are many other sources that provide these statistics and some of them have even more detailed data such as onchainfx coincheckup, cryptowatch or some can be more creative, like crypto bubbles and coin360 which provide some more quirky visuals for those who aren’t very keen on the standard numeric-based UI.