Which of the Top Cryptocurrencies Can You Actually Buy on Your Exchange?

There are thousands of cryptocurrencies and a few hundred that matter: the top two hundred or so by market capitalisation carry nearly all the liquidity and nearly all the attention. Every list of leaders, every momentum screen and every "altcoin season" chart is drawn from that group. Yet no single exchange sells all of it. The broadest venues carry around four coins in five; some well-known, long-established exchanges one in four or fewer — and what is missing is concentrated exactly where the rankings are most interesting, among the mid-caps that lead a rotation before anyone has noticed.

That leaves a trader in a position that would be absurd in equities: reading a ranking of a couple of hundred names knowing that some unknown share of them cannot be bought at any price on the account they have. This guide puts numbers on that share, explains why the published catalogues of the global exchanges overstate it, and shows how we solve it — by letting the ranking be filtered to the coins your exchange trades, without changing what the ranking means.

How many of the top coins each exchange lists

We rank 176 coins — the top names by market capitalisation after removing stablecoins, wrapped and bridged assets, liquid-staking derivatives and other pegged tokens, with a liquidity floor. Each exchange below publishes the codes it trades; we read that list every day and count how many of our 176 it covers.

Counts are the overlap between each exchange's own published catalogue and the coins we currently rank, as at the date shown. They move a little most weeks as exchanges list and delist and as the universe is reviewed.

Why the global exchanges' numbers flatter them

Binance, Coinbase and Kraken each publish one worldwide catalogue, and that is the list counted above. What a given customer can buy is narrower: regional entities carry subsets, some assets are geo-fenced, and in several countries the exchange operates under a licence that restricts the range — a global exchange's local arm can be a separate business with a shorter list than the parent. So read a global exchange's row as an upper bound — the most you could buy there from anywhere — not as what your account will show.

The Australian venues are the opposite case. Swyftx, CoinSpot, Independent Reserve, CoinJar, BTC Markets and Digital Surge each publish the list they sell to Australian customers, so their rows are not inflated the way the global ones are — and the broad local brokers among them match the global exchanges on this measure, which surprises people who assume a local account means a short list. (CoinJar's figure is its exchange product; its app may carry more.) They are also, for most Australian traders, the only numbers that matter: an exchange you cannot open an account with has a coverage figure of zero whatever its catalogue says.

One caveat on the matching itself. Exchanges publish ticker codes, and a code can mean different things in different places or be spelled differently for the same coin. We reconcile the known cases, but the count for any venue should be read as close rather than exact — the right order of magnitude to compare exchanges by, not a figure to audit to the last coin.

A leader you can't buy is noise

A relative-strength ranking scores each coin's performance against every other coin and reports where it sits as a percentile. Its value is in the top of the list: the names outperforming the field right now, because outperformance in this market persists for longer than most people expect. If a third of those names are unavailable to you, the top of your list is a third noise. You spend attention on coins you will never hold, and when a tradable leader appears in the next bracket down you have already stopped reading.

The wrong fix is to rank only the coins your exchange sells. A percentile is a position within a field, and shrinking the field changes every number: the 80th percentile of sixty coins is a weaker claim than the 80th of two hundred, and the two cannot be compared with each other or with anything else published. The ranking has to be computed over the whole universe or it stops being a ranking.

The right fix is to rank everything and filter the view. Each coin keeps the percentile it earned against the full field; you simply hide the ones you cannot buy. A coin shown at the 92nd percentile on your filtered screen is at the 92nd percentile, full stop — a leader of the whole market that happens to be one you can act on.

Choosing an exchange with the ranking in mind

• Coverage of the mid-caps, not the top ten. Every exchange lists Bitcoin and Ethereum. The difference between venues is almost entirely in ranks thirty to two hundred, which is where leadership changes hands first. If you trade rotation rather than holding the two largest coins, the coverage figure above is the one to compare.
• Listings arrive late and leave quietly. Exchanges add a coin after it has already run and remove one after it has already failed, and a delisting can force a sale at the worst moment. A coin available on only one venue in the table is a coin you may have to exit on that venue's timetable rather than yours.
• Two accounts beat one wide one. A regulated local exchange for the names it carries and a global exchange for the rest is a common arrangement, and the filter accommodates it — switch the exchange on the screen, or clear it to see the whole field and note which venue each leader needs.
• Availability is not endorsement. An exchange's decision to list a coin says something about demand and little about quality. The ranking measures performance against the field; the filter measures nothing at all, it only removes what you cannot act on.

Reading the rankings once they're filtered

The ranking itself is explained in Relative Strength Explained: what a percentile measures, why it is not the RSI, and why persistence is the property that makes it worth following. On crypto the benchmark is Bitcoin rather than an index and the bars run seven days a week, which the crypto feature page sets out in full — including the calendar arithmetic that makes a 200-bar average cover a shorter span here than it does on a stock exchange.