Top 200 crypto: ranks 101 to 200, live

Think of crypto's market cap rankings as a football league with two divisions. The top 100 is the first division, where the big clubs rarely go down. Ranks 101 to 200 are the second division, crowded and loud and full of teams on their way up or on their way out. Every cycle, a handful get promoted. More get relegated.

This page shows that second division as live bubbles, sized and colored by how each coin is trading right now. If you're after Bitcoin, Ethereum and the rest of the established names, the top 100 crypto page covers them. This one is for the coins just below, where most of the volatility and most of the surprises live.

Mid cap altcoins, and what lives in this range

The coins ranked 101 to 200 are mostly mid cap altcoins, usually worth somewhere between a few hundred million and a little over a billion dollars, depending on how the market is doing. That's big enough to be listed on major exchanges (most of them, at least) and small enough that a single good month can double them.

Look at the names here on any given day and you'll find a mix. Older projects that used to rank higher and drifted down. Newer tokens that launched with big valuations and are still finding their level. Plenty of gaming tokens from the 2021 boom sit here, along with a handful of governance tokens from DeFi's first wave.

What they have in common is thinner trading than the top 100. A coin ranked 150th might trade a few tens of millions of dollars a day, against billions for the leaders, so prices here move harder on smaller orders. Before placing anything sizable, it's worth learning how to calculate slippage, because the spread between what you expect to pay and what you actually pay widens quickly down here.

Altcoin season, when this page wakes up

Altcoin season is the stretch of a bull market when altcoins outperform Bitcoin across the board. Most altcoin season index versions call it when roughly three quarters of the top altcoins beat Bitcoin over the previous 90 days. Those indexes usually look at the top 50 or top 100, which is a little odd, because the coins that move most in an altseason are often the ones on this page.

The pattern tends to run in order. Bitcoin moves first, then Ethereum, then the large caps, and only then does money spill down into ranks 101 to 200, where the percentage moves get dramatic. By the time this page is a wall of bright green, the move is usually late, not early. I used to read a green second division as a buy signal. Now I read it as a sign the party has reached the kitchen.

The fear and greed index tends to sit deep in greed when that happens. And the altcoin bubble chart on the home page shows whether the rally is spreading through the whole market or only these mid caps.

Namecoin, the first altcoin, launched in April 2011 as a fork of Bitcoin built to run a censorship-resistant domain system. It still exists, technically. It sits far below this page now, which says something about how long first-mover advantage lasts in crypto. Not long.

Promotion and relegation

Coins leave this range in both directions all the time. Moving up into the top 100 usually takes a real catalyst, like a major exchange listing or genuine growth in usage. Moving down is easier. Token unlocks add supply while attention fades, so a coin can slide from 120th to 250th in a few months without any single piece of bad news.

That's why the rank number on its own is a weak signal. A coin at 180 that was at 300 last year is a different story from one at 180 that was at 60. When you're weighing two coins from this range, a crypto chart comparison tool that shows both over a year, along with their correlation to Bitcoin, tells you far more than where they happen to rank today.

My bias is toward coins climbing into this range rather than falling into it. Falling coins have holders waiting to sell at break-even. Rising ones have fewer people trying to get out.

What this page leaves out

Bubbles show movement, not quality. Two coins at rank 140 can be a working network with real users and a token coasting on a 2021 brand, and they'll look identical as circles. For digging into any single project here, CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap both have fuller pages, with supply schedules and contract addresses, and they're better than a bubble for that job.

This page also takes CoinGecko's ranking as it is, wrapped and bridged tokens included, so a few spots in this range go to versions of coins that already appear higher up. I'd filter those out if I could. For now they stay, so treat a bubble you don't recognize with some suspicion until you've checked what it is.

One coin's trip through the second division

Kaspa is a decent example of how this works. A proof-of-work chain that launched in late 2021 with no presale, it spent its first year far outside the top 200, then climbed through this range during 2023 and broke into the top 30 at points in 2024, by most counts. For a while it was one of the few coins promoted all the way to the upper table without a big marketing push.

It also shows the other side. Rankings in this part of the market are rented, not owned. A coin that reaches the top 30 in one cycle can be back on this page in the next, and the bubbles will show it happening long before anyone writes about it.