Quick gut check: which sounds cheaper, a token priced at $0.1344 or one priced at $72.46? If your instinct said the first one, you just fell into the exact trap this post is about.
Price per token is basically meaningless on its own. What actually matters is two other numbers most people never check: market cap (price × circulating supply — what's actually in play right now) and FDV, or fully diluted valuation (price × max supply — what the token is worth if every unit that will ever exist were already circulating). The gap between those two numbers tells you how much dilution is still coming.
Here's $LAB doing the math for us. Price: $0.1344. Circulating supply: 455.09M tokens. Market cap: $61.19M. But max supply is 1 billion — and multiply that out and you get an FDV of $134.39M, more than double the market cap. Subtract circulating from max and you're left with 544.91M tokens that don't exist yet in the trading supply, worth roughly $73.24M at today's price. That's a bigger number than the entire current market cap, sitting there waiting to unlock over time. Every token that vests doesn't add value — it just adds supply, and price has to fight that supply with fresh demand or it gets diluted.
Now compare that to the "expensive-looking" assets. Bitcoin has issued 20.06M of its 21M max supply — 95.5% already circulating, virtually no dilution left. Ethereum's circulating and total supply are identical — FDV equals market cap exactly, and its burn mechanism actually makes supply shrink at times. $SOL sits in between: 581.19M circulating against a 631.5M total, meaning most of its supply is already out and the remaining gap is proportionally small next to its size.
That's the actual difference between "low price" and "cheap." LAB looks like a bargain at $0.13 until you realize the float you're buying into is less than half the coin's eventual supply. A token can drop 99% and still not be cheap if there's a supply wall waiting behind it.
So next time a price tag looks like a steal — what's the first thing you actually check: the price, or the supply it's standing on?