Crypto Sectors: Live Market Data by Category

A crypto sector view is the closest thing the market has to a stock sector map. Rather than staring at thousands of ticker symbols, you see the whole asset class broken into DeFi, Layer 1, Layer 2, AI, Gaming, Meme Coins, Real-World Assets, Liquid Staking, DePIN and 25 other functional groups — each with its own aggregate market cap, 24 hour change, and top constituent coins.

Data on this page comes from the CoinGecko categories endpoint and is cached at the edge for ten minutes. The dashboard above refreshes as soon as CoinGecko does. For a wider view of the asset class, pair this page with the market overview and the Fear and Greed Index.

How to Read the Sector Table

Four columns do most of the work:

• Aggregate market cap — sum of all coins CoinGecko groups under that sector. Tells you how much capital the sector is holding at any given moment. DeFi is usually in the tens of billions; AI coins, until late 2024, were a small single-digit billion slice; meme coins have bounced between $20 billion and $90 billion depending on retail mood.
• 24 hour change — the average move across every coin in the sector, weighted by market cap. Green days here nearly always mean green days for every individual constituent; when a sector is deep red, even the best-run projects inside it tend to bleed.
• 24 hour volume — total trading volume across every coin in the category. Volume matters more than price on very short timeframes. A sector rally on no volume usually unwinds inside a week.
• Top 3 coins — icons of the three largest coins by market cap within the sector. Click through to see the full constituent list and the live price table.

Why Sectors Beat Individual Coin Picks

Picking winners inside a sector is genuinely hard. Picking the right sector to be in is the bigger lever. Anyone long on AI tokens as a basket between October 2023 and March 2024 made money whether they held Fetch.ai, Bittensor, Render or Ocean — because the sector was in a bid. Anyone long on meme coins through January 2026 made similar gains across the basket for the same reason.

That is the practical argument for thinking in sectors: you skip the “is this the one?” question and replace it with “is this sector in a bid?”, which is a far easier question to answer from the numbers above.

The 20+ Sectors We Cover in Depth

Each sector below gets its own landing page with the live constituent list, aggregate stats, and a background note on what the category actually contains. Click any tile on the dashboard to go straight to the deep dive. These pages are the best way to answer search queries like “best DeFi coins”, “top AI crypto” or “largest Layer 2 tokens”.

• DeFi — lending, DEXs, yield, derivatives
• Layer 1 — base chains from Bitcoin and Ethereum to Solana and Sui
• Layer 2 — Ethereum scaling rollups like Arbitrum, Base and Optimism
• Smart Contract Platforms — the general-purpose chains
• Stablecoins — USDT, USDC, DAI and the yield-bearing newer generation
• AI Coins — artificial intelligence, from Bittensor to Fetch and Render
• Meme Coins — DOGE, SHIB, PEPE, WIF and the long tail
• Gaming — play-to-earn, game platforms and guild tokens
• Real World Assets — tokenised treasuries, credit and equities
• Liquid Staking — LSDs like Lido stETH and Rocket Pool rETH
• DEX Tokens — Uniswap, Jupiter, Aerodrome and co
• CEX Tokens — exchange tokens like BNB and OKB
• NFT Tokens — marketplaces, blue-chip infrastructure
• Privacy Coins — Monero, Zcash and the rest
• Oracles — Chainlink, Pyth and the data-feed layer
• Storage — Filecoin, Arweave and decentralised storage
• Lending — Aave, Compound, Morpho, Spark
• DePIN — decentralised physical infrastructure networks
• Zero-Knowledge — ZK-rollups, ZK proving systems, privacy
• Modular — Celestia, Avail and the modular stack
• Bitcoin Ecosystem — Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20 and BTC L2s
• Ethereum Ecosystem — every token that lives on Ethereum
• Solana Ecosystem — tokens native to Solana
• Restaking — EigenLayer and the derivative staking layer

Sector Rotation, Plainly

Capital does not land on the entire market at once. It rotates. The pattern over the past three cycles has looked like this: Bitcoin leads, Ethereum follows a few weeks later, Layer 1 altcoins outperform once ETH has broken out, and then the smaller growth sectors — DeFi, AI, gaming, meme coins — catch up last and deliver the wildest percentage moves. By the time the retail crowd is focused on meme coins, Bitcoin is usually a month away from a local top.

You can watch this rotation happen in the 24 hour changes on the dashboard above. When a few growth sectors go deep green while Bitcoin trades flat, you are seeing a classic alt rotation. When everything is green including BTC, you are in a broad-based rally. When growth sectors are red while BTC is flat, that is risk-off and usually the prelude to a retrace.

None of this is financial advice. It is just pattern recognition from the last few years, and having the data in one place makes the pattern easier to see.