CoinMarketCap lists almost thirteen thousand coins. Clearly, we need a map.

A map implies a distance. An obvious one (although not the only interesting one) is simply how prices move: if two coins move more or less the same way at the same time, then as investments, and perhaps in other ways, they are more or less the same.

Similarly to what we are already doing to map the S&P 500 and TED talks, we took currently active coins with a reasonable price history over the last six months, and used the isomap algorithm to create a two-dimensional map that attempts to describe the structure of the high-dimensional space of those coins' price histories.

This is how the crypto world looks under this lens:

The first thing to note is that the five coins with the highest volume (measured at a point of time; there's volatility here, as in everything else in the crypto world) are all close together in a "galactic core" that agglomerates most coins and trading volume. Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD Coin, Polygon, and XRP are different constructs with different goals and properties, but for financial, technical, and perhaps ultimately cultural reasons, they tend to move together in relative sync. It's not that "crypto is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is crypto", but this map shows that, from the point of view of the topology of how prices move, that's not exactly not true either.

And yet, there's more to this galaxy than its core. Keeping in mind that any two-dimensional map of an intrinsically multidimensional data distribution is going to be at best conceptually useful, but never entirely right, we see in the map three "branches" - sets of coins with prices that behave increasingly out of step with the Bitcoin Core, and also with each other.

We can get some sense of how these offshots look like — in what ways the crypto galaxy extends extends away from a its richer, traditional (for crypto) center — by looking at what's going on at the extremes.

One branch ends with BitDAO and Compound - a group of more properly DeFi-oriented group of coins that the market treats as separate from the core.

Much different, in price behavior and intent, is the branch that ends on Polychain Monsters, the Shapeshift FOX Token, and the Save Environment Token, a weird set until you realize they are all based on the idea of owning/collecting/trading some sort of not necessarily financial asset, whether a virtual monster(?) or a hopefully less virtual solar panel.

Last but not least, there's the exemplified by ParallelCoin and Spiking; it might not be unfair to say that they are coins designed to help people trade other coins, or at least to speculate on this being the most specialized meta-financial branch of the crypto world.

An special mention to CyberFM, the most isolated of the coins in our data set. The market, it seems, isn't quite sure of what to make yet of the intersection of "listening to music" and "crypto," but that's only a matter of time.

So what's the takeaway?

In short, that the crypto world is both less and more diverse than it seems, much of what's going on simply reflecting what happens with Bitcoin, yet with some tendrils exploring uncorrelated possibilities around, perhaps among other things, decentralized finance, asset holding, and, I guess, ways to try and make more money in the galactic core. And there's the music.

Is this the future of finance as social infrastructure? If you've read so far, chances are I'm more skeptical of this being the case than you are. But I suspect this Cambrian explosion of Internet-speed for-profit semiotics, technological mythology, and hundreds of billions of dollars moving in and out of existence like a deranged quantum foam may be a powerful aspect of how the intersection of technology, economics, and culture work now, and understanding this will bring possibilities both obvious and unforeseeable. There be dragons here, and no maps but the ones we sketch as we walk around.