Many beginners get confused by these letters when viewing charts on exchanges. Today, I’ll sort out these common counting units for everyone.

Actually, these abbreviations in exchanges are used to make it easier to express large numbers. For example, 1k stands for 1000. If the trading volume is written as 1000, it may look a bit wordy, but writing it as 1k makes it instantly clear. Similarly, 1m means 1 million, so when you’re looking at trade value or market cap, you can understand the order of magnitude more quickly.

If you go higher, 1e represents 100 million, which is often used when reading market-wide data. Even bigger is 1b, which is 1 billion. If you’re dealing with particularly large numbers—such as the total market cap of certain major projects or an exchange’s daily trading volume—you may use 1t, which represents 1兆, or 10^12 (ten trillion).

So just remember this mapping: 1k=1000, 1m=1 million, 1e=100 million, 1b=1 billion, 1t=10 trillion. Next time you see units like 1k, you’ll know exactly what they mean—especially when comparing trading volume or market cap across different trading pairs. In fact, this system is very common in the finance field; exchanges just adopted it. Once you get used to it, you’ll find that reading data becomes much faster.