Alpha Map: crypto bubble chart with core risk scores

The Alpha Map puts the largest cryptocurrencies on one screen. Each coin is a bubble. You can hover a bubble for a quick look, click it for more detail, and filter the view so you only see the part of the market you care about.

Most bubble charts colour coins by how much the price moved today. The Alpha Map does that too if you ask for it, but by default it colours each coin by the Altcoin Rules core risk score. That score looks at how stretched a coin is in the market cycle, not only at what it did in the last day.

Think of it as a scanning layer. It helps you see where the market looks calm or stretched at a glance, and it points you to a coin's own page when you want to go deeper.

Three things on every bubble matter: its size, its colour and its label. Size is based on market-cap rank, so Bitcoin and Ethereum are the biggest. It is the rank that sets the size, not the exact market cap, and sizes are relative to the coins in the current view. Zoom the view down to the top 10 and those bubbles grow.

Colour runs from green through amber to red. Green means a lower core risk score, red a higher one. The colour blends smoothly between 0 and 100, so it does not jump at the label borders in the table below. A coin with no stored score is drawn as a dark bubble with a dashed outline, so you can tell the difference between unscored and a middling score. You can also switch the colour to price change, with a 24H or 7D timeframe. Then red means the price fell, green means it rose, and grey means close to zero. Every coin gets a colour in this mode, scored or not, and the dashed outline only shows in score mode. A small legend in the corner of the map repeats what the number, colour and size mean.

Click a bubble to open a panel with the score out of 100, its label, and a breakdown of the indicators behind it. Click a second bubble to compare the two side by side. The search box finds a coin by name or ticker, but only among the coins in the view you are on. A toggle labelled Scored in the toolbar hides coins that have no score.

The list of coins is our own coin catalogue, taking the top 250 and removing stablecoins. Prices, 24-hour and 7-day changes, market cap, volume and the small 7-day price line come from CoinGecko and are cached for about five minutes. The strip above the map adds up market cap and 24-hour volume for the coins drawn in your current view (stablecoins are left out), not for the whole market, and the count next to the label shows how many coins that is. Bitcoin dominance and the Fear & Greed reading come from our market data feed, and if they are unavailable the page says so.

The risk score is the stored Altcoin Rules core score for each coin. It blends several weighted indicators, such as the Risk Wave, a two-week RSI, the distance from the previous high, dominance and market sentiment such as the Fear & Greed Index. Funding rate and token unlocks are kept as separate modifiers. A scheduled job refreshes stored scores every 4 hours, but by default it covers a set of coins (a few featured ones, the coins in our own tracked portfolio and the coins members hold in their portfolios), so not every coin on the map has a score.

When you open a coin, the panel loads the indicators again and shows the breakdown, with each indicator marked Live, Unavailable, Not tracked or Not used. This is a fresh look and can be a little newer than the stored score that sets the bubble colour, so the rows may not add up exactly to the number. Each coin's full page, such as the risk pages and the coin profiles, carries the long version.

The map starts on the top 50 coins. Presets change which coins are drawn: Top Movers (the 25 coins with the biggest 7-day price change, up or down), the top 10, 25, 50 and 100, and category views such as Layer 1, Layer 2, DeFi, AI, Meme, Gaming, Infrastructure, Exchange and Payments. A category only shows up if the data holds coins for it.

Logged-in members with coins in their portfolio also get a My Portfolio view, which draws just those coins, even if they sit outside the top 250. Your chosen preset, your search and the coin you opened are kept in the page address, so you can bookmark a view or send the link to someone. The colour mode and the 24H or 7D choice are not kept. You can also save the current map as an image or share it on X.

Keep these in mind before you read anything into a colour.

A made-up example. You open the map on the Top 50 view and see that most large coins are green while a few mid-cap coins are deep red. You click one of the red bubbles, read the indicator breakdown and see which indicators push the score up. Then you compare it with a green coin in the same category.

You now know where to look closer. You switch the colour to the 7-day price change and notice that the red coin also fell this week, which fits the picture but does not prove anything. For how scores read in a weak market, see our guide on Altcoin Rules during extreme fear. The map told you where to look, not what to do.

The Alpha Map and this explainer are free to use. You do not need to log in to see the map, switch presets, search, compare coins, change the colour mode or open a coin's score breakdown. We found no Premium lock on the map itself.

Logged-in members get a few extras: the My Portfolio view and a button to add a coin to their watchlist from the panel. Logged-out visitors see a Get Alpha Alerts button there that goes to the pricing page. Check the pricing page for what a paid plan includes today.