How far can a pump go? We measured 567 of them against market cap
CryptoOracle has added a new study to its Hockey-stick finder: Pumps vs market cap. It answers a question every trader who has been short a small coin has asked: how far can this thing actually go?
What we measured
We took daily candles for 545 Bybit USDT perpetuals over the last 365 days and marked every run of at least +100% within 10 days. That gave 567 pumps on 249 coins. For each one we looked up the coin’s market cap on the day the pump started, using historical market cap data, not today’s supply.
What we found
Market cap does not predict the size of a typical pump. The rank correlation between market cap at the start and pump size is −0.06, which is as good as none. The median pump is about +150% whether the coin starts at $5M or $500M, and one pump in ten exceeds roughly +400% in every size range below $1B.
Market cap does set a ceiling. 99% of pumps peaked below a market cap of $7.3B. The biggest runs of the year all stopped in the same $5–8B zone: RAVE went from $76M to $7.1B (+9,295%), ARIA from $129M to $7.7B (+5,864%), AKE from $346M to $6.8B and SIREN from $440M to $5.4B.
Above $1B, pumps are rare and small. Only 5 of the 45 coins that large pumped at all, and none gained more than +323%.
The most pump-prone coins sit at $10–30M. 65% of coins in that range pumped at least once during the year, against 32% of coins under $10M and 6% of coins at $1–3B.
What it means
The worst case for a coin is roughly the distance from its market cap today to that ceiling. A coin at $150M has room for about 50×; one at $750M about 10×; one at $2.5B about 3×. For a small coin the ceiling is so far away that it offers no protection, and position size has to do that job instead.
What is in the tool
- A chart of every pump: its size against the coin’s market cap at the start, with the ceiling drawn in.
- A table of all 545 coins: market cap now, room left below the ceiling, biggest run of the year and number of pumps. It can be sorted, searched and filtered by size.
- A page per coin: a year of daily candles with each pump marked, and the market cap at the start and at the peak of each one.
Limits
The study covers one year and one exchange, and the ceiling rests on a handful of extreme coins. It was broken four times, each time by a coin that already started above $3B. It is an observed limit, not a guarantee, and nothing here is investment advice.
The study is available now at hockeystick.cryptooracle.app/pumps for CryptoOracle subscribers on the Macro plan.