Recently, a friend asked me what those letters like K, M, E, B, T on exchanges actually stand for, and I realized that many beginners might really not be clear. So I decided to organize it, to save everyone from having to Google every time.

Actually, this counting system is very simple; it’s used to represent large numbers. The most basic is 1K equals 1k, which most people probably know. Going higher, 1M is one million, which is 1,000 times K.

Further up is 1E, representing 100 million. Then 1B is one billion. If you ask what 1T is, that’s a trillion level, and this number is already quite huge.

When I first started trading crypto, I also often got confused, especially when looking at market charts, as these units suddenly popped up and I couldn’t react immediately. Later, I understood that these are actually internationally common abbreviations for numbers, making it easier for everyone to quickly understand market cap, trading volume, and other large figures.

For example, if a project’s market cap is 5B, you can instantly see it’s 5 billion. If it were written as 500,000,000, anyone would have to count for a while. So, exchanges use this system to make data clearer and easier to read.

Next time you see these letters, just interpret them according to this correspondence, and you’ll hardly go wrong. Especially the unit 1T, although it’s not very common in the crypto market, you might occasionally encounter it, and knowing it stands for trillion is enough.