CryptoWeeklies / Glossary
What is TWAP in crypto?
TWAP stands for time-weighted average price. It is the average price an asset has traded at over a period, with every time interval counted equally — no weighting by volume, no weighting toward recent days.
Lifetime and expanding TWAP
Most charts here use a lifetime or expanding TWAP: the window starts at the asset's first trading day and grows to today. Every new day is added to the average, so the line moves slowly and gets steadier as history accumulates.
That makes it useful as a baseline. It is not trying to track price; it is trying to describe the centre of gravity that price has traded around.
Premium and discount
The number most pages show next to TWAP is the premium or discount — how far above or below that baseline the current price sits, as a percentage. An asset at +100% has doubled relative to its lifetime average. An asset at −30% is trading below it.
That percentage is also what feeds the Gravity Risk score.
Why TWAP and not a moving average
A 200-day moving average tells you about the recent trend and forgets everything older. An expanding TWAP never forgets. They answer different questions, and this site publishes both — see the 200-week moving average explainer for the other one.
The limits
TWAP treats a thin, illiquid early year exactly as heavily as a deep, liquid recent one. For an asset whose first months were near-zero volume, the lifetime average is dragged down by prices almost nobody actually traded at. Newer assets have short, noisy baselines. Treat the number as context, not as fair value.