Volume In Context Glossary: 26 Terms, Defined Plainly

Every term below is used somewhere on this site, and each definition is written to be read on its own. Where a term has more than one common meaning, the definition says which one this desk uses and why the other one causes trouble. There are 28 entries, grouped by what they describe rather than alphabetically, because the groups are the argument.

Figures and the ratios built from them

Trading volume: The summed value of the trades an indexer recognised for a token, over a stated window, across the venues that indexer covers. It is a sum of sizes, not a count of participants, and it makes no distinction between directional flow and round trips.
Turnover: Window volume divided by the depth available when the reading is taken, expressed as a plain multiple. A turnover near one means the reserves traded roughly their own value; a turnover in the tens means the same reserves were cycled repeatedly.
Average trade size: Volume divided by the transaction count over the same window. It survives most convention differences because both inputs come from the same trade stream, which makes it the ratio that still works when depth cannot be established.
Volume per address: Window volume divided by the number of distinct addresses that traded in it. It measures concentration of flow across addresses, and because addresses are free, it is an upper bound on participation rather than a count of people.
Price impact: The difference between the quoted price and the price actually received, caused by the trade itself moving the reserve ratio. In a constant-product pool it scales with the order size relative to the reserve being drained.
Slippage: The gap between the price expected when an order was submitted and the price at which it settled. It includes price impact from the order itself plus any movement caused by other transactions landing first.

Market structure

Bonding curve: A launchpad mechanism where a token price follows a formula over how much of the curve supply has been sold, using reserves fixed when the curve was deployed. There is no liquidity provider setting depth and no second reserve that ordinary trading can drain.
Curve progress: How far a bonding curve has advanced along its path, usually shown as a percentage. Buys advance it and sells retreat along it, so round-trip trading adds volume while leaving progress close to where it started.
Constant-product pool: A pool holding two reserves whose product is held constant by the swap formula, so the price is the ratio of the reserves and every trade moves it. The standard automated market maker structure on Solana and elsewhere.
Reserves: The token balances a pool holds on each side. They are ordinary on-chain accounts, which means depth can be verified directly rather than accepted from a dashboard field.
Liquidity: On a dashboard, the value of the reserves in a pool, most often with both sides added together. As a property of a market it means the ability to transact at a price close to the quote, which is what the reported figure is a proxy for.
Concentrated liquidity: A pool design where providers place their deposits into chosen price ranges rather than across the whole curve. Total deposited value overstates the depth available at the current price, which makes turnover computed against it look lower than the execution experience.
Migration: The event where a token leaves its launchpad curve and its remaining reserves are deployed into a standard pool. It is a change of venue rather than a change in activity, and data providers handle it inconsistently.
Deep pair: An established market whose reserves are large relative to the flow passing through it, so trades are absorbed with little price movement. The only structure where a volume figure loosely matches the intuition most readers bring to the word.

Counting and reporting

Indexer: The service that decodes transactions, recognises swaps belonging to programs it supports, values them and publishes the totals. Every convention that makes two volume figures incomparable is a decision made here.
Venue set: The specific pools, curves or programs a reported figure covers. Two providers indexing different venue sets produce different totals for the same token, and neither is wrong.
Reporting window: The period a figure covers, and the rule that defines it. A rolling window always contains the last N hours; a fixed window resets at a clock boundary and contains only the time since that reset.
Route accounting: Whether a trade routed through several pools is counted once per pool leg or once per user intent. Per-leg counting can record the same value more than once on a multi-hop route, which inflates the figure without extra activity.
Multi-hop route: A trade that passes through more than one pool inside a single transaction, for example from one token to SOL and then to another token. The main source of double counting in reported volume.
Round trip: A buy followed by a sale of the same size by the same participant. It adds roughly twice its own value to volume and leaves net position unchanged, and no indexer nets round trips out of a published total.
Reference price: The external price an indexer uses to value one side of a swap in a common currency. Token-for-token swaps require a reference for at least one leg, which is a further place where two providers can legitimately disagree.
Produced volume: Volume that exists because someone deliberately placed swaps in order to create it. The trades are ordinary, the fees are real, and the resulting figure is counted identically to any other, which is why volume alone cannot establish demand.

Valuation and cost

Market capitalisation: Circulating supply multiplied by the last traded price. Because the price comes from the same pool that produced the volume, ratios of volume to market capitalisation have the pool on both sides.
Circulating supply: The portion of total supply treated as available to the market. It is an editorial judgement rather than a chain field, because which locked, vested, treasury and burned balances are excluded is a decision each provider makes for itself.
Fully diluted valuation: Total supply multiplied by the same last traded price, ignoring whether that supply can reach the market. It removes the circulating-supply judgement and replaces it with an assumption of full dilution.
Base fee: The fixed per-signature fee every Solana transaction pays, charged whether the transaction succeeds or fails. It puts a floor under what a given transaction count cost to produce.
Priority fee: An additional fee attached to a transaction to compete for inclusion when the network is busy. Added to the base fee, it is what makes a high transaction count a meaningful expenditure rather than a rounding error.
Fee floor: The minimum amount someone spent to put a given number of transactions on chain, computed as transaction count multiplied by a plausible all-in per-transaction cost. It ignores failed attempts, which also pay, so it is a floor rather than an estimate.

How the definitions fit together

Read the first group and you have the figures. Read the second and you know which machine produced them. Read the third and you know why two correct figures can disagree. The fourth exists because cost is the one part of a volume figure nobody can avoid paying, and cost is often the most defensible thing you can say about a busy token page.

The definitions are applied in practice in what trading volume means, and the errors they are designed to prevent are catalogued in five comparisons that mislead.