A while ago, I pointed out how easy it is to manipulate Market Cap with crypto currencies, and how these numbers can be completely meaningless. In my example I showed how I could theoretically create a currency that would have a market cap thousands of times bigger than the GDP of the United States with little effort and user adoption:
Macro-economic measurements in general (Such as Market cap or GDP) are usually subject to these types of inaccuracies. However the extremely low market barrier to entry coupled with the ability to customise virtually every aspect of the currency, enables such extreme inaccuracies that the measurements become useless.
For this reason, I prefer to stick away from these macro-economic measurements in general. However, without macro-economic measurements, it becomes difficult to gauge market support in the whole crypto-currency space. You can easily get an accurate measurement of sentiment for fork coins by comparing the market price of the original coin to the fork coin (Eg Bcash / Bitcoin) both pre-fork (Through futures markets) and post fork.
One interesting indicator that I noticed Jimmy Song tweeted recently adds the total buy orders from the top 10 exchanges. The difference between the accuracy of market cap and buy orders is that buy orders enables you to gauge how much 'skin in the game' people are willing to place in a currency. Although this too would be subject to some inaccuracies, it pales in comparison to the possible scenario with market cap I pointed out above
https://twitter.com/jimmysong/status/1048954035951345666
