Bitcoin ranks #1 of 504 cryptocurrencies — assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus mechanism.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A+ · 89/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #1 |
| Rank counting claims | #1 |
| Market capitalisation | $1.62T |
| Price | $80,421 |
| Circulating supply | 20,104,884 BTC |
| Maximum supply | 21,000,000 BTC |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | SHA-256 |
| Own hashrate | 1.09 ZH/s |
| Network purpose | Settlement ledger |
| Ledger type | Overlay-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | No premine |
| Regulatory class | Commodity |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
A+ — 89 out of 100, provisional (from 19 of 20 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 84 to 89 (A+ to A+).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 10 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 8.9 | group average, 11 of 12 measured |
| Sound Money Properties (6 checks) (Source) | 8.3 | 5 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity (Limited supply · 1 Store of value · Whitepaper §6) | 10 | fixed maximum supply of 21 million: supply scale 10, cap 10 |
| Durability (Sustainability · 1 Store of value) | ✓ | 17 full years since genesis, no halt, freeze or reversal in five years |
| Fungibility (Interchangeability · 3 Unit of account) | ✓ | every unit identical and worth any other |
| Portability (Scalability · 2 Medium of exchange) | ✗ | typical fee $0.013, over a cent; about 12 transactions a second, 1.2 on the throughput scale (5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Divisibility (Flexibility · 3 Unit of account) | ✓ | 8 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $0.00080 |
| Verifiability (Authenticity check · 1 Store of value · Whitepaper §8) | ✓ | node software open source; light clients verify from headers or proofs |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 6.1 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 6.3 | typical fee $0.013 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 1.2 | about 11.8 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 10 | a block every 10 minutes |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 6.4 | 4 MB limit |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper §11) | ✗ | Ten-minute probabilistic blocks, and Bitcoin Core relays full replace-by-fee by default since v28, so zero-confirmation payments are not protected by the network. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✓ | Bitcoin Core 0.11 (2015): -prune keeps the UTXO set and recent blocks (at least 288). |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✓ | SPV with Merkle proofs since the 2008 whitepaper; BIP 157/158 compact block filters served by Bitcoin Core 0.21 (2021). |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 9 | 9 of 9 points source |
| Miner pay (A day, $1,000 0 to $10 million 10; 2 points) | 10 | about $36,505,896 a day |
| Own hashrate (Half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined) | ✓ | |
| Largest pool (Pool or validator under 50%) | ✓ | 26% |
| Largest three (Under 75% together) | ✓ | 63.2% |
| Clients (More than one maintained) | ✓ | 2 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | Bitcoin Core is maintained by independent contributors funded by many separate companies and grants; btcd (btcsuite) is a separate implementation. |
| Real use (1,000+ transactions a day) | ✓ | about 714,813 a day |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Decentralisation | 10 | section average, 7 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level party can freeze, blacklist or claw back coins or halt the chain. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: Bitcoin Core is maintained by independent contributors funded by many separate companies and grants; btcd (btcsuite) is a separate implementation. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 10 | 12,138 reachable nodes source |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 10 | Fair launch: no premine |
| Fundraising | 10 | No sale of the coin |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners who produce blocks |
| Privacy | 4 | section average |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 4 | 2 of 5 passed source |
| Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10) | ✓ | Anyone can generate keys and receive and send coins; the consensus rules carry no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger (A new key for each payment · Whitepaper §2, §9) | ✓ | |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | ✗ | Bitcoin Core 31.0 (Apr 2026): -privatebroadcast sends own transactions over Tor/I2P, but it is opt-in and needs Tor/I2P set up; no Dandelion relay. |
| Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential) | ✗ | No confidential transactions in the protocol; amounts are public. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | ✗ | No ring signatures, ZK sender proofs or stealth addresses in the protocol. |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 4.4 | 4 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (Through a metaprotocol) | 1 | Ordinals/BRC-20, Runes, Omni, Counterparty, RGB, Taproot Assets: read by indexers, not validated by the chain's nodes |
| Smart contracts (Scripting for spending conditions) | 1 | Bitcoin Script limited to spending conditions (signatures, hashes, time locks, multisig); no general contract system on the base layer. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | m-of-n OP_CHECKMULTISIG (bare and P2SH) plus nLockTime, OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (BIP 65, 2015) and OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (BIP 112, 2016). |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | HTLCs (hash branch plus CLTV/CSV refund branch) expressible in standard Script, as specified in BIP 199; Garden runs BTC HTLC swaps. |
| Native exchange (Built into the protocol) | ✗ | No order book or AMM in the consensus rules. |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains; bridges and sidechains are run by third parties. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✗ | No token type in consensus; Ordinals inscriptions are read only by indexers. |
| Supply & Demand | 8.9 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 7.8 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 48 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 10 | $7,135,558,557 traded in 24 hours; #2 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $8,788,605,695) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 4.9 | 0.54% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 4 | $264,031,619 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.02% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 7 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 10 | $1617B, at the top of the scale |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 7.7 | futures, options and margin positions 5.2% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 10 | fixed maximum supply of 21 million |
| Record | 9.7 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 10 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| No halt, freeze or reversal in five years | ✓ | |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 10 | 17 full years since genesis. Genesis block mined 3 January 2009. |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 9 | 4 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 3,712 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin); Bitcoin Core v32.0, released 2026-10-21; regular six-monthly major releases. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Bitcoin Core 30.0, Oct 2025: fixed four disclosed low-severity vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-46597, -46598, -54604, -54605); 29.0, Apr 2025, fixed a remote-code-execution bug disclosed later. |
| Shipped a privacy improvement in two years, +1 | ✓ | Bitcoin Core 31.0, Apr 2026: opt-in private broadcast sends a node's own transactions over short-lived Tor/I2P connections (P2P transport, not consensus). |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Bitcoin Core 29.1 (Sep 2025) and 30.0 (Oct 2025): default minimum relay fee cut tenfold, 1 to 0.1 sat/vB (relay policy, not consensus; no block-size change). |
Twenty criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards have five sections: sound money (six qualities: scarcity, durability, fungibility, portability, divisibility, verifiability), scalability (four measures and three features), security (miner pay and seven checks), decentralisation (censorship resistance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share) and privacy (five checks); programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) follows them. Provisional: criteria marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
20,104,884 of a maximum 21,000,000 BTC are in circulation — 95.7% of the total that will ever exist.
| Nodes or validators | 12,138 |
|---|
Bitcoin is secured by 1.09 ZH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.
Named a digital commodity in the joint SEC-CFTC interpretation (Mar 17, 2026).
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Bitcoin is #1 among cryptocurrencies and #1 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. Nothing above Bitcoin is a claim or a token, so its two ranks agree. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).
See the 39 wrapped and staked claims on Bitcoin →