Methodology
This site aims to be something you can cite. That means every figure has to say where it came from, what year it is for, and what it actually measures.
Classes are ranked separately
A country’s national wealth, a currency’s money supply and a coin’s market capitalisation are quantities of different kinds, produced by different institutions using different methods. Ranking them in one column would invite readers to compare numbers that do not support the comparison, however carefully each row is labelled. So each class gets its own table and its own #1. Aggregate comparison — totals against totals — lives on the cross-class page.
Stock and flow
Stock is what something is worth in full at a point in time: national wealth, market capitalisation, money supply. Flow is what it produces over a period: GDP, annual output, trading volume. Adding the two would make Germany “worth more than” a large company, which is meaningless. Each class is ranked on whichever ladder is both meaningful and current for it; the other ladder is one click away.
What size means, per class
- Countries — GDP in current US dollars (flow, 2025) is the primary ladder. National wealth is the stock measure, but the World Bank publishes it only every few years and the latest available reading is 2020, so it is the second ladder with its year shown.
- Currencies — broad money (M2) of the issuing economy, derived from GDP and the broad-money-to-GDP ratio. Money supply belongs to the currency, not to the country: assigning it to both would double-count and would place an economy and its own currency next to each other with identical figures.
- Cryptocurrencies — market capitalisation (stock) and 24-hour volume (flow).
Every figure carries its own year
National statistics are published on different schedules. We take the most recent non-empty value within the last six years and show its year next to the number. Forcing a single year on everyone would drop dozens of countries that report late.
Sources
- World Bank — GDP, national wealth, money supply, population, inflation, unemployment, life expectancy, reserves.
- European Central Bank, via Frankfurter — reference exchange rates. Authoritative but narrow: 29 currencies.
- open.er-api.com — exchange rates for the remaining 137 currencies. Where the ECB publishes a rate, the ECB rate wins.
- CoinGecko — cryptocurrency prices, capitalisation and volume.
Country and currency names come from a reference table frozen into the repository. It is a name lookup, not a data source: no figure on this site originates there.
Stale entries
Data is refreshed twice a day. When a source does not answer, we do not blank the row or drop it — the previous value is carried over and the row is marked stale. A gap in the data should be visible, not disguised as an empty cell.
Archive
Every snapshot is kept permanently at a stable address. You can point at the state of a ranking on a given day and it will not change under you. Derived values — ranks, changes, charts — are recomputed from snapshots, so correcting a calculation never rewrites the underlying record.
Not here yet
Metals, commodities, equities and indices need keyed data sources and are not included. They are absent rather than partial: half a class shown as if it were whole is worse than no class at all.