Trading volume
In short Trading volume is the total value of a token bought and sold in a period, usually 24 hours. It measures trading activity, not how easily you can exit.
Trading volume is the total value of a token that changed hands over a set period, most often 24 hours. If people bought and sold $2 million worth of a token in that window, its 24-hour volume is $2 million. It is usually quoted in dollars or in a base asset like SOL, ETH, or BNB, and each trade is counted once, because every completed trade has exactly one buyer and one seller.
On a decentralized exchange, volume is the sum of swaps against the token's pools, read from onchain events. On a centralized exchange, it comes from the exchange's own matching engine, so you are trusting what the exchange reports. Trackers add these numbers up across venues and often disagree, because they index different pools, price swaps differently, and handle multihop swaps differently. A swap routed through several pools may be counted once or once per hop, which can inflate a total.
Volume measures turnover, which is not the same as liquidity. It shows how much trading happened, but how well you can enter or exit depends on pool depth, your trade size, and the spread. A token can post large volume and still have a thin pool that punishes a big order, so volume relative to market cap is a rough activity gauge, not proof of genuine buyers and sellers. Spikes often appear around breakouts, listings, and sell-offs, so they can show where attention is going.
Volume is easy to fake on small tokens. Wash trading means one party buys and sells to itself to look busy, and bots can do this cheaply on low-fee chains. Volume that is very large relative to liquidity is not proof of anything by itself, but it is a reason to investigate.
Read volume alongside liquidity, holder count, and the number of distinct traders. On a chart tool or block explorer, look at unique wallets and individual transactions, and remember that buy and sell counts depend on which side of the pair the tool treats as the token. Check whether the volume is spread across the day or arrives in one burst. High volume says nothing about direction, since a heavy sell-off produces volume just like a rally.