What Is Galaxy Score? LunarCrush's Metrics, Explained Honestly

Galaxy Score is LunarCrush's proprietary 0 to 100 metric that blends social activity with market data to express the overall "health" of a crypto asset, stock or other tracked topic in a single number. Higher is better. AltRank is its sibling metric: instead of scoring an asset on its own scale, it ranks it against every other asset on the platform by combined social and market performance, where a lower rank is better and #1 is best.

Quick disclosure: we build Orpail, a different tool in the same space, and we are not affiliated with LunarCrush. This is the plain-English explainer we wished existed, based on what LunarCrush has publicly documented. Where the metrics are genuinely useful we say so, and where their design limits what they can tell you, we say that too.

What goes into Galaxy Score

LunarCrush describes Galaxy Score as a combined measure of indicators used to understand the overall health, quality and performance of an asset. In its own historical documentation, the score has been built from four kinds of inputs:

• Price score: a moving-average based read on whether market value is trending up or down
• Social sentiment: a machine-learning model, trained on crypto-specific language, classifying posts as bullish or bearish
• Social engagement / impact: the volume and depth of interactions (posts, likes, shares, comments) around the asset
• Correlation score: a measure of whether the social and market indicators are moving in the same direction at the same time

Two things are worth knowing about that list. First, the exact recipe is proprietary: since around late 2021, LunarCrush no longer exposes the full component breakdown, so the published inputs are a guide to the philosophy rather than the current formula. Second, and more important for how you read the number: market data is inside the score. Galaxy Score is not a pure measure of social activity. Price behaviour feeds it directly.

What goes into AltRank

AltRank answers a different question: not "how is this asset doing?" but "how is this asset doing compared to everything else?" It combines social activity with market performance (for crypto, historically including price performance relative to Bitcoin) and ranks every tracked asset against its peers. An AltRank moving from #200 toward #20 means the asset is climbing the league table of combined social and market momentum.

How traders commonly read them

Community guides tend to converge on rules of thumb: a Galaxy Score above roughly 70 is read as strong, below 40 as weak or inactive, and a low or rapidly improving AltRank is read as an asset outperforming its peers. LunarCrush itself supports alerts on both metrics, and plenty of traders use them exactly this way, as a fast screening layer.

We would gently add: those thresholds are conventions, not evidence. A convenient number is not the same thing as a validated signal, which brings us to the limits.

What Galaxy Score and AltRank cannot tell you

Why the number moved. A composite that blends price, sentiment and engagement into one figure is easy to glance at and hard to interrogate. If Galaxy Score rises from 55 to 75, you cannot see from the score alone whether price drifted up, a sentiment model reclassified the chatter, or engagement genuinely surged. The ingredients are, by design, not fully public.

Whether social interest is independently rising. Because price momentum is an input, a rising Galaxy Score partly restates the fact that price has been rising. If you then use the score to anticipate price, you are to some degree reasoning in a circle. That does not make the metric useless, but it does mean "high Galaxy Score" and "strong recent price action" are not independent observations.

Whether attention is unusual for this asset. AltRank compares an asset against all other assets. That structurally favours the permanently loud: a megacap or a top-ten coin can sit near the top of a relative ranking forever without anything unusual happening to it. Relative rank answers "who is loudest", not "who is unusually loud", which are very different questions.

The future. LunarCrush has historically framed Galaxy Score as aiming to be a leading indicator. The published research on social data and price prediction is far less confident, a topic we covered in does social media sentiment predict stock prices? Whatever tool you use, treat a score as context, not a forecast.

Galaxy Score vs an attention-only metric

The comparison that matters is not "which score is bigger" but what instrument you actually need. Galaxy Score is a price-blended health composite: one number that summarises social and market conditions together. Social Heat, the metric we build at Orpail, deliberately goes the other way: no price inputs at all, only attention, decomposed into three visible drivers (volume, velocity, breadth) and measured against each asset's own baseline rather than against other assets.

Neither design is "correct". If you want a single blended read on social plus market momentum, Galaxy Score does that and does it conveniently. If you want to know whether attention on an asset is unusual for that asset, and to see exactly which driver is responsible, that is the job attention-only measurement was built for. We compared the two products more broadly in LunarCrush vs Orpail.

FAQ

What is a good Galaxy Score? By community convention, above ~70 is read as strong and below ~40 as weak. Treat these as rules of thumb traders use, not validated thresholds, and remember that recent price action is part of what pushes the score up.

What is the difference between Galaxy Score and AltRank? Galaxy Score rates an asset on its own 0 to 100 scale. AltRank ranks it against every other tracked asset, where lower is better. One is absolute, one is relative; both blend social and market data.

Is Galaxy Score free to access? LunarCrush's free Discover tier covers market data but not its social metrics; at the time of writing, access to social data starts with the Individual plan at $90 per month. Details are in our LunarCrush alternatives comparison.

Does a high Galaxy Score predict price increases? No metric reliably does. Because price momentum feeds the score, high scores and rising prices often arrive together without the score having predicted anything. The research on social data as a price predictor is weaker than the marketing around it.

What is the Orpail equivalent of Galaxy Score? Social Heat, a 0 to 100 attention score with no price inputs, built from volume, velocity and breadth against each asset's own baseline. You can see it live for 4,000+ stocks and crypto assets on our most discussed page.

Orpail provides informational and educational data about publicly available social media and news activity. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any asset, or a prediction of price. Galaxy Score and AltRank are trademarks of LunarCrush; descriptions reflect publicly available documentation at the time of writing (July 2026) and may not reflect current formulas. Always do your own research.