BitShares ranks #197 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #1490: 1293 of the 1489 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 1720 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 75% are tokens, 20% are claims on other assets and 6% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 66/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #197 |
| Rank counting claims | #1490 |
| Market capitalisation | $3M |
| Price | $0.000948 |
| Circulating supply | 2,995,060,000 BTS |
| Maximum supply | 3,600,570,502 BTS |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | DPoS (graphene) |
| Network purpose | Financial ledger |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
B — 66 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 63 to 68 (C to B).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 9.1 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 6 | group average, 11 of 12 measured |
| Sound Money Properties (6 checks) (Source) | 7.3 | 4.4 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity (Limited supply · 1 Store of value · Whitepaper §6) | 3.5 | fixed maximum supply of 3.6 billion, but an issuer or vote can mint outside the schedule: supply scale 7, cap 0 |
| Durability (Sustainability · 1 Store of value) | ✓ | 12 full years since its first recorded price, 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 $0.00125; about 4,444 transactions a second, 10 on the throughput scale (5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Divisibility (Flexibility · 3 Unit of account) | ✓ | 5 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $9.5e-9 |
| Verifiability (Authenticity check · 1 Store of value · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | node software open source; no light clients or pruned nodes |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 6.3 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 9.7 | typical fee $0.00125 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 10 | about 4,444 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 1.7 | a block every 3 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 2 MB limit, 400 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 0 | 0 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper §11) | ✗ | Blocks are every 3 s, but irreversibility needs 2/3 of the 17 witnesses to build on a block; last_irreversible_block_num ran 14 blocks (~42 s) behind head on 2026-10-26. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✗ | witness_node replays and keeps the full block log; only account-history plugins can be trimmed. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | No proof-based light client; wallets connect to API nodes. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 5 | 5 of 9 points source |
| Miner pay (A day, $1,000 0 to $10 million 10; 2 points) | 0 | not mined |
| Own hashrate (Half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined) | ✗ | not mined |
| Largest pool (Pool or validator under 50%) | ✓ | 29.4% |
| Largest three (Under 75% together) | ✓ | 41.2% |
| Clients (More than one maintained) | ✗ | 1 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | bitshares-core (MIT) is maintained by volunteer and worker-funded developers (mainly abitmore) under the community bitshares GitHub organisation; no company controls it. |
| Real use (1,000+ transactions a day) | ✓ | about 27,600 a day |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Decentralisation | 6.6 | section average, 7 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: The core asset BTS has no issuer whitelist or override permissions, and the elected committee can change chain parameters but cannot freeze or seize ordinary users' BTS. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: bitshares-core (MIT) is maintained by volunteer and worker-funded developers (mainly abitmore) under the community bitshares GitHub organisation; no company controls it. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 4.1 | 17 active validators or block producers (source: Active) |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 1.9 | 80.5% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. The BitShares 2.0 genesis (October 2015) carried over ~2.412B BTS from BitShares 1.0. BTS 1.0 was split 50% to AngelShares (AGS) donors and 50% to ProtoShares (PTS) holders as a founders' airdrop, with later merges of DNS and Follow My Vote. Against ~2.995B current supply, 2.412/2.995 = about 80.5%. source |
| Fundraising | 1.9 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 80.5% of supply was theirs to sell, 33% sold so far. AngelShares (AGS) donation drive from December 2013 into 2014, in BTC and PTS, to Invictus Innovations, for 50% of the initial BTS. The BTC total was not found. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.4 | Developer share: about 6.4% of today's supply received so far; no share of new block rewards today. BitShares 2.0 mints a budget from the reserve (unissued supply up to the 3.6B max) at each hourly maintenance: witness pay to block producers plus pay for holder-voted workers, a treasury-like cut. Core-development and committee-owned workers (including committee dividend and market-operation funds) were paid mainly from 2015 to 2020; since 2021 only refund and threshold workers sit above the line, so real worker pay is about 0 today. Arithmetic: worker budget minus leftover, summed over all 96,683 budget records (2.13.x, Oct 2015 to Oct 2026), is 520.69M BTS; minus 330.22M returned to the reserve by refund/burn workers (total_burned) = 190.47M / 2,996.93M current supply = 6.4%. source |
| Privacy | 2 | section average |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 2 | 1 of 5 passed source |
| Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10) | ✓ | Accounts are registered on chain by any existing account (with a fee) and controlled by user keys, with no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger (A new key for each payment · Whitepaper §2, §9) | ✗ | |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | ✗ | Graphene P2P relays transactions directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential) | ✗ | Balances and transfers are public on-chain objects. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | ✗ | Sender and receiver accounts are public. |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 6.7 | 6 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | User-Issued Assets (UIAs), native Graphene objects any account can create for a fee. |
| Smart contracts | 0 | Graphene chain with fixed operations (orders, assets, HTLCs, pools, credit offers); no user-deployable contracts or script. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | Weighted multi-signature account authorities, plus htlc_create/redeem operations whose timeout refunds the sender. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | Native HTLC operations (htlc_create, htlc_redeem, htlc_extend) in the protocol, with hash preimage and timeout. |
| Native exchange (Built into the protocol) | ✓ | On-chain order book (limit_order_create) since launch, and liquidity pools since the September 2020 hardfork. |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No protocol-level cross-chain messaging; gateways are third parties. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | User-Issued Assets can be created with a supply of 1 and precision 0; NFT tools issue them with an nft_object description, though no NFT BSIP exists. |
| Supply & Demand | 5.9 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 4.7 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 2 | 2 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 1.7 | $57,851 traded in 24 hours; #1747 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $70,920) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 7.9 | 2.0% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 5.4 | $1,171 within 2% of the price on 2 exchanges, 0.04% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 1.1 | $2.8M, 1.1 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 10 | no futures, options or margin on the exchanges read |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 7 | fixed maximum supply of 3.6 billion |
| Record | 7.3 | 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 | 12 full years since 2014-07-21, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 2 | 1 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 2 of 6 | ✓ | 40 commits in 1 of the last 12 months (github.com/bitshares/bitshares-core); bitshares-core 7.0.4 (2026-10-23) and 7.0.3 (2026-09-10) are Docker-image rebuilds with 'No changes to the consensus or functionality'; the previous code release was 7.0.2 on 2023-12-15. |
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.
2,995,060,000 of a maximum 3,600,570,502 BTS are in circulation — 83.2% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 80.5% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 33% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 6.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Nodes or validators | 17 |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
The BitShares 2.0 genesis (October 2015) carried over ~2.412B BTS from BitShares 1.0. BTS 1.0 was split 50% to AngelShares (AGS) donors and 50% to ProtoShares (PTS) holders as a founders' airdrop, with later merges of DNS and Follow My Vote. Against ~2.995B current supply, 2.412/2.995 = about 80.5%.
AngelShares (AGS) donation drive from December 2013 into 2014, in BTC and PTS, to Invictus Innovations, for 50% of the initial BTS. The BTC total was not found.
BitShares 2.0 mints a budget from the reserve (unissued supply up to the 3.6B max) at each hourly maintenance: witness pay to block producers plus pay for holder-voted workers, a treasury-like cut. Core-development and committee-owned workers (including committee dividend and market-operation funds) were paid mainly from 2015 to 2020; since 2021 only refund and threshold workers sit above the line, so real worker pay is about 0 today. Arithmetic: worker budget minus leftover, summed over all 96,683 budget records (2.13.x, Oct 2015 to Oct 2026), is 520.69M BTS; minus 330.22M returned to the reserve by refund/burn workers (total_burned) = 190.47M / 2,996.93M current supply = 6.4%.
soldPct assumes the AGS half was ~1B of a ~2B BTS 1.0 initial supply (about 33% of today's supply), which is not directly confirmed. Worker payments, some to core developers, are holder-voted and are not counted as insider.
Sources: api.bts.mobi · github.com · github.com · coinmarketcap.com · howbitsharesworks.readthedocs.io · docs.bitshares.eu. Researched 2026-10-26, medium confidence.
No SEC/CFTC determination — unclassified.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
BitShares is #197 among cryptocurrencies and #1490 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. The 1293 places between BitShares's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. 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).