What an all-time high is, and which price it is measured against
An all-time high is the highest price an asset has reached, but that price is itself a calculation rather than a single number. The price data providers show is a volume-weighted average taken after outliers are removed. We explain what an ATH is measured against, and why it can differ between providers.
In brief
An all-time high is the highest price an asset has been recorded at.
It sounds like a single number. It is not, and it is worth looking at where that price comes from.
The price you see is an average
An asset trades on dozens of exchanges at once, at different prices. The single price a data provider shows is those prices combined. CoinGecko describes its own method this way:
"Once outliers have been removed, we calculate the VWAP of all remaining tickers in the ticker set to arrive at the final aggregated price."
Two stages: outliers are filtered out first, then the remainder is averaged by volume.
Which means the price you are looking at may not be exactly current on any single exchange. It is a summary.
So what is an ATH measured against
An ATH is the highest point that calculated price has reached. It therefore depends on three things:
Which currency. A peak against the dollar and a peak against another asset need not fall on the same date.
Which provider. Different providers include different exchanges and different pairs.
Which pairs. If an asset trades in only a few pools, its average comes from a correspondingly narrow base.
What "down 80% from its high" actually says
That sentence is a comparison, not a measurement. Its denominator is a moment in the past, so it is only as meaningful as the price formed at that moment was sound.
If an asset reached its high on a single trade in a thin pool, distance from it tells you little today. If the high formed in a deep market across many exchanges, the same percentage carries far more weight.
Commonly confused
An ATH is not one true number. It shifts with provider and with currency. Two sources showing different highs may both have measured correctly, just different things.
A dollar high and a high against another asset need not fall on the same day. An asset can sit at a high against the dollar while it has been falling against bitcoin for months.
An ATH is a record, not a target. It describes something that happened; it carries no information about whether it will happen again.
Risks
Biggest uncertainty An ATH can differ by provider, by currency and by which trading pairs are included; it is not a single absolute number.
Things to watch when reading this number:
- Looking at one source. Different providers can show different highs; you need to know which one you are reading.
- Skipping the currency. A dollar high and a high against another asset can fall on different dates.
- Mistaking the past for a target. An ATH records something that happened; it does not indicate something that will.
Sources
This article rests on the sources below. Whether each has a permanent copy is stated next to it.
- #1
Gösterilen fiyatın tek bir borsadan değil, hacimle ağırlıklandırılmış bir ortalamadan geldiğinin kaynağı.
coingecko.com· archive copy· no screenshot· cited 2 times in the text
Evidence chain: 1 sources
Tweets get deleted, sites go down. Below is whether a durable copy exists for each source.
Sources (1)
- #1
Gösterilen fiyatın tek bir borsadan değil, hacimle ağırlıklandırılmış bir ortalamadan geldiğinin kaynağı.
“Once outliers have been removed, we calculate the VWAP of all remaining tickers in the ticker set to arrive at the final aggregated price.”
coingecko.com/en/methodology- no screenshot captured
- archived copy
- captured on Sep 7, 2026, 10:39 PM