Iris Thaumas
Iris Thaumas writes the CoinSpectrum journal and blog. Iris is the Greek goddess of the rainbow, the spectrum the site is named after.
The posts come out of the same work as the ranking itself: deciding, chain by chain, whether an asset has its own blockchain and its own consensus, and so whether it counts; running nodes on test networks to see how forks actually behave; reading exchange reserves from the chain rather than from attestations; and checking every incident, figure and claim against the source that published it before it appears in a post. Where a source is missing, a post says so instead of filling the gap.
The method is public in the methodology, and every number in a post can be traced to the data on the site. Corrections are made in the post itself.
Posts
- Blog · 28 October 2026The three functions of money: store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account
The three functions of money: it holds value over time, it moves value between people, and it measures value. What each function asks of a cryptocurrency, which sound money properties serve it, and in what order a new money earns them.
- Blog · 28 October 2026Sound money: the six properties, and how a cryptocurrency meets each
Sound money is money its issuer cannot debase. Its six properties, scarcity, durability, fungibility, portability, divisibility and verifiability, what each means for gold and for a cryptocurrency, and how the CoinSpectrum Grade checks them.
- Journal · 27 October 2026Bitcoin Cash didn't launch in 2017: what a chain split actually creates
Bitcoin Cash and BTC share one history from the 2009 genesis block to block 478,558. A chain split makes two branches of one chain, not a new coin and an airdrop.
- Blog · 27 October 2026The Cryptocurrency Standards: properties, scalability, security and decentralisation
The standards any cryptocurrency can be held to, in four parts: ten properties quoted from the 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper, scalability, security and decentralisation, and how the CoinSpectrum Grade scores them.
- Blog · 27 October 2026How the CoinSpectrum Grade is scored: twenty criteria, supply and demand read live
The CoinSpectrum Grade now scores a coin on twenty equal criteria: two consensus ladders, the Cryptocurrency Standards in five sections (sound money, scalability, security, decentralisation with issuance in it, and privacy), programmability, supply and demand read every minute, supply, the record, age and development.
- Blog · 27 October 2026Regulatory classes of cryptocurrencies: commodity, contested, security, unclassified
Which cryptocurrencies a US regulator has classified as commodities or alleged to be securities, where each class comes from, and the full list, rebuilt every build.
- Blog · 27 October 2026What decentralisation means: seven questions, in order of importance
Decentralisation is not one property. Seven questions, from who can produce blocks to where nodes run, ranked by importance, and how the CoinSpectrum Grade measures each.
- Journal · 26 October 2026Does more trading make a coin less volatile? Turnover, futures and six months of prices
A test on over a hundred cryptocurrencies: coins that turn over more of their market cap a day were more volatile, not less. Coins with more futures open interest were more volatile too, but it did not predict the next quarter.
- Journal · 25 October 2026CoinMarketCap vs CoinGecko vs CoinPaprika: how crypto ranking sites count, compared
How CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, CoinPaprika, CryptoSlate, LiveCoinWatch, CoinCodex and CoinSpectrum count cryptocurrencies, why the totals run from hundreds to millions, and which to use.
- Journal · 23 October 2026Which cryptocurrencies have a fixed supply? Capped and uncapped coins
Bitcoin, Litecoin, Zcash, Kaspa and Cardano have a maximum supply; Ethereum, Monero, Dogecoin and Solana do not. Which native coins are capped, how each cap works, and what a cap does not tell you.
- Journal · 21 October 2026BIP-110: how a soft fork became a new cryptocurrency
BIP-110 split Bitcoin on 8 August 2026 with 2.5% of miners behind it, mined eight blocks in twenty days, then left SHA-256 for BLAKE2b. The chain is alive, trades as BTCB2, and by the counting rule it is a separate cryptocurrency.
- Journal · 16 October 2026Crypto analytics platforms compared: what each one counts, filters and charges
CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, CoinPaprika, CryptoSlate, LiveCoinWatch, CoinCodex, CoinStats, Messari, DefiLlama, Glassnode, Nansen, TradingView, Dune and CoinSpectrum: coverage, free tiers and what each does best.
- Journal · 16 October 2026Which crypto platforms filter by blockchain, consensus and mining algorithm
Finding every proof-of-work coin, or every SHA-256 chain, is harder than it should be. Which crypto platforms filter by consensus, mining algorithm and coin vs token, and how.
- Journal · 16 October 2026Crypto portfolio trackers compared: accounts, privacy and what each can see
Which crypto portfolio trackers work without an account, which need an email, and which can read your holdings: CoinStats, Delta, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, Koinly, Rotki, Zerion, CoinSpectrum and more.
- Journal · 16 October 2026How many cryptocurrencies are there? Native coins vs tokens
Only a few hundred cryptocurrencies are native coins with their own blockchain and consensus. Counts in the tens of thousands include tokens, stablecoins and wrapped copies. The live count, by family.
- Journal · 13 October 2026Crypto wallet hacks: which wallets lost user funds, and which never did
Which crypto wallets lost user funds through the maker's own failure, which have never been hacked, and the safest setup: Ledger, Trezor, Coldcard, MetaMask, Atomic and more compared, and why multisig wins.
- Journal · 11 October 2026Browsers that support Web3 domains
Browsers that open Web3 domains without an extension: Theseus Navigator (Bitcoin Cash Domain Names, .bch, .x), LibreWeb (.fn), Brave (.eth, .sol, .crypto), Opera, Puma, Aloha and Osiris, and where to get each.
- Journal · 3 October 2026Where a DEX runs, and what it actually trades
Most of the largest cryptocurrencies cannot be traded as themselves on a DEX on their own chain. Which venues trade the real coin, and why where a DEX runs and what it trades are two different questions.
- Blog · 17 September 2026Fair launch or pre-mined: how the coin got into circulation
A new filter on the ranking separates coins that started empty from coins that shipped with an initial allocation. The bucket a chain lands in shapes who holds it, who governs it, and who gets to sell it early.
- Blog · 16 September 2026What a cryptocurrency actually is
Crypto means hidden. The Bitcoin whitepaper was a solution to one problem: money on the internet without a bank in the middle. Everything the site's counting rule accepts or refuses is a corollary of those two facts.
- Blog · 14 September 2026How CoinSpectrum ranks exchanges
Nine signals, weights that sum to 100, reserves checked on chain, and a reliability ratio that measures claimed liquidity against the venue's own traffic. Every number behind the CEX score, stated.
- Journal · 13 September 2026In 2022, a Bitcoin cycle bottom fell below the previous peak for the first time. In 2026, it's happening again.
In 2022, a Bitcoin cycle low fell below the previous cycle's peak for the first time in a decade — the 2021-cycle bottom of $15.6k crossed under the 2017 peak of $19.8k. In 2026 it is happening again with the 2025 cycle, plus every other stat, and the one number that has not moved across five cycles.
- Blog · 13 September 2026CoinGecko dropped web traffic. This ranking kept it.
CoinGecko's Trust Score dropped web traffic for order-book depth in 2026. That swapped a signal exchanges can't fake for one they can. CoinSpectrum kept it.
- Blog · 13 September 2026The dollar, minted on crypto rails
Roughly $300B of dollar-pegged tokens now circulate on crypto rails. Two issuers hold 88%. Here is who they are, what actually backs each coin, and where reserve claims have broken before.
- Journal · 27 August 2026We tested SegWit against legacy nodes on regtest. It's a hard fork.
A 10-node regtest study of SegWit vs pre-SegWit consensus at six hashpower ratios. Both sides validate honestly by their own rules; the rules diverge; the chain splits at every ratio. Plus the direct anyone-can-spend test on Bitcoin Core 0.12.1 and what 'backward-compatible' actually covered.
- Journal · 23 August 2026Bitcoin took two upgrade paths in 2017
On 1 August 2017 the Bitcoin network activated a block-size upgrade; three weeks later a separate SegWit upgrade activated on the same network. Calling one 'Bitcoin' and the other 'a fork of Bitcoin' is inheritance by ticker, not by protocol history.
- Journal · 23 August 2026Hard fork vs chain split
A hard fork is a protocol upgrade. A chain split is what happens when a hard fork doesn't get the coordination it needs and two groups of nodes keep running two versions. Same mechanism at activation, different outcome in the days that follow.
- Journal · 23 August 2026SegWit: soft fork by classification, hard fork by function
SegWit is universally classified as a soft fork. Legacy nodes did not crash. But they lost the ability to verify signatures the whitepaper's Section 2 says are the definition of ownership — and the activation was forced on miners by economic threat, not consensus. On the mechanics, it is a hard fork wearing a soft-fork label.
- Journal · 23 August 2026Why we count BTC, BCH and BSV as three cryptocurrencies
Same protocol lineage, same algorithm, same twenty-one-million cap. Three chains, three consensus, three separate items in the ranking — the counting rule applied to its hardest case.
- Journal · 22 August 2026The proof-of-work hashrate leaderboard doesn't exist
Twenty-eight cryptocurrencies still carry a hashrate figure, and between them they use twenty different algorithms. A single ranking that adds them up ranks nothing at all.
- Blog · 21 August 2026A token is not a cryptocurrency
None of the tokens listed on the site produces a block of its own. They rent someone else's consensus, and are ranked separately for that reason.
- Blog · 21 August 2026A wrapped Bitcoin is not a second Bitcoin
Every aggregator counts wrapped and pegged assets alongside the things they represent. A wrapped coin is a claim on an asset already in the list, so counting both counts it twice.
- Blog · 21 August 2026Hashrate is not one number
A SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash are different units wearing the same suffix. Why the column groups by algorithm, and what merge-mined hashpower actually measures.
- Blog · 21 August 2026Ninety-five of them are unclassified, and we print it
Of the 527 cryptocurrencies on the site, only 23 have ever had a regulator take a position. Sites that show a clean category for every asset are printing a guess.