Market cap versus liquidity
Market cap multiplies price by supply. Liquidity is the pool you can actually trade. They answer different questions.
Market cap here is the figure published by CoinGecko when the token is listed there. It is price times a supply number. A wrong supply makes a wrong market cap, which is why dust and broken supplies are filtered out of mover lists upstream.
Liquidity is the USD depth of the best DEX pool DexScreener or GeckoTerminal reported. You trade against the pool, not against the market cap.
A token can show a large market cap and a thin pool. The ready bar asks for at least $50 in that pool. That is a low bar on purpose, so more contracts stay visible. It will include pools a small market order can shove.
The minute tape stores these two numbers side by side so a later backtest can see them as printed, not as a story.
Source for the lead essay: Meme Money, Real People: Decoding the Crypto Memecoin Crowd, a non-peer-reviewed preprint. Associations are not causes, and the sample is not every investor. This page is not advice.