Crypto assets: 24 guides cover 83% of the market, 70% of it bitcoin

Our assets section runs a guide for each of 24 coins, and the selection covers more of the market than the number suggests. It also shows, quickly, how little of crypto is actually diversified.

“A guide that only tells you a coin went up has told you nothing you cannot read off a chart.”

— Intokened, Editorial note, 19 September 2026

Our reading of what an asset guide is for

Crypto assets: how concentrated the list is

The concentration, measured at 13:30 UTC:

• The 24 coins we cover are worth $2.187 trillion together, 83.0% of the whole market.
• Bitcoin alone is $1.539 trillion of that, 70.4% of the 24 and 58.4% of everything.
• The top three of the 24 account for 88.5% of the group.

Put differently, 23 coins share 29.6% of the group between them while one takes the rest. A reader who owns all 24 in market weight owns something that behaves almost exactly like bitcoin. That is not an argument against the other 23, it is an argument for knowing what you hold, and it is the first thing the section is meant to make obvious.

Each guide answers the same set of questions rather than following the news: what the asset is for, where it came from, how supply works, what it is used for now, and what can go wrong. The bitcoin and ethereum guides run to about 25,000 characters each, the newer ones less, and every one ends in a frequently-asked section that exists because those are the queries people actually type. The list runs from bitcoin and ethereum down to Aptos, Sui and Cosmos, so it covers both the assets nobody needs introduced and the ones where an introduction is the whole point.

What the guides are for

The month behind them explains why guides age better than prices. Twenty-three of the 24 are up over 30 days, with a median of 19.5%. The best is Arbitrum at plus 117.4%, the worst is Polygon at minus 29.6%, and a spread of 147 points inside one basket describes almost nothing about the basket. We made the same point on Tuesday about breadth measures: an average across this market is usually hiding more than it shows.

What the section is not is a recommendation list. Inclusion follows market size and reader demand, not conviction, and a guide to a coin says only that enough people needed the explanation. Terms used inside the guides link through to the glossary, so a reader who arrives at proof of stake or a supply cap without the background can pick it up without leaving the page. Market figures come from public data and carry the time they were taken. A guide is worth reading twice: once when you are curious, and once when the price has moved and the curiosity has become a decision.

Informational material, not investment advice. Market data was measured at 13:30 UTC on 17 September 2026.