Ethereum ranks #2 of 504 cryptocurrencies — assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus mechanism.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 79/100 · provisional, B to A+ |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #2 |
| Rank counting claims | #2 |
| Market capitalisation | $284.7B |
| Price | $2,330 |
| Circulating supply | 122,170,166 ETH |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Gasper (Casper-FFG + LMD-GHOST) |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
| Regulatory class | Commodity |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
A — 79 out of 100, provisional (from 18 of 20 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 72 to 82 (B to A+).
| 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) | 7.1 | group average, 10 of 12 measured |
| Sound Money Properties (6 checks) (Source) | 9.2 | 5.5 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity (Limited supply · 1 Store of value · Whitepaper §6) | 4.5 | no fixed maximum; 122 million in circulation: supply scale 9, cap 0 |
| Durability (Sustainability · 1 Store of value) | ✓ | 11 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 $0.004; about 238 transactions a second, 6.1 on the throughput scale (5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Divisibility (Flexibility · 3 Unit of account) | ✓ | 18 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $2.3e-15 |
| 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) | 6.9 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 8 | typical fee $0.004 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 6.1 | about 238 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 3.9 | a block every 12 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 1.5 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 75 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper §11) | ✗ | Blocks every 12 s, but economic finality (two Casper-FFG epochs) takes about 13 minutes. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✓ | Partial history expiry (Jul 2025): every execution client can run without pre-Merge blocks (geth --history.chain postmerge), on top of state pruning. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✓ | Altair (Oct 2021): sync committees of 512 validators sign headers so light clients verify without trusting a server. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 6 | 6 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%) | ✓ | 21.2% |
| Largest three (Under 75% together) | ✓ | 43.6% |
| Clients (More than one maintained) | ✓ | 5 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | Several independent client teams (Geth/Ethereum Foundation, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth/Paradigm) and an open EIP process; no single organisation approves protocol changes. |
| Real use (1,000+ transactions a day) | ✓ | about 1,815,335 a day |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Decentralisation | 7.8 | section average, 6 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level key or party can freeze or claw back ETH; issuer blacklists exist only inside individual token contracts. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: Several independent client teams (Geth/Ethereum Foundation, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth/Paradigm) and an open EIP process; no single organisation approves protocol changes. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | — | Not yet counted |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 4.1 | 58.9% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Genesis allocation of 72,009,990.5 ETH (about 60M sold in the 2014 crowdsale plus about 12M to early contributors and the Ethereum Foundation) against a current total supply of 122,155,370 ETH (Etherscan supply page, 2026-10-23). source |
| Fundraising | 4.1 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 58.9% of supply was theirs to sell, 49.2% sold so far. 60,102,216 ETH sold in the July-September 2014 public ether sale for about 31,500 BTC; the ~12M ETH to early contributors and the Foundation were not sold. 60,102,216 / 122,155,370 ETH current supply (Etherscan, 2026-10-23) = 49.2%. 42-day public ether sale, July to September 2014, open to anyone paying in BTC (2000 ETH/BTC falling to 1337 ETH/BTC). Raised about 31,500 BTC (about $18M at the time). Two extra pools, each 0.099x the ether sold, went to early contributors and the Foundation endowment. No private or venture round in ETH. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No cut. Proof-of-work block rewards (2015-2022) went entirely to miners, and proof-of-stake issuance since the September 2022 Merge goes entirely to validators. The EIP-1559 base-fee burn is a burn, not a cut. 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) | ✓ | Any secp256k1 key can hold and send ETH; the chain's account and transfer rules carry no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger (A new key for each payment · Whitepaper §2, §9) | ✗ | |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | ✗ | Geth and the consensus clients gossip transactions directly over devp2p/libp2p; no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential) | ✗ | No shielded pool or confidential transactions in the protocol; privacy contracts are applications. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | ✗ | No protocol-level sender or receiver hiding. |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 7.8 | 7 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | ERC-20 (and ERC-721/1155) contracts on its EVM, open to any account since launch in 2015. |
| Smart contracts (General-purpose) | 2 | The EVM, open to any account since the 2015 launch, runs DEXs, lending and other applications on mainnet. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | N-of-M multisig contract accounts (Safe and others) and time-delayed execution contracts such as OpenZeppelin's TimelockController. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | HTLC contracts (secret hash plus block-number timelock refund), e.g. Garden's EVM HTLC used for BTC swaps. |
| Native exchange (Built into the protocol) | ✗ | No exchange in the protocol; Uniswap and others are user contracts. |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No protocol-level messaging to other chains; rollup and bridge contracts are deployed by third parties. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | ERC-721 NFT contracts run by every node on the EVM. |
| Supply & Demand | 8.6 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.2 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 46 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 10 | $2,395,500,017 traded in 24 hours; #4 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $3,194,857,990) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 6.4 | 1.0% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 5.7 | $149,311,850 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.05% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 3 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 10 | $285B, at the top of the scale |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 6.8 | futures, options and margin positions 10% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 9 | no fixed maximum; 122 million in circulation |
| 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 | 11 full years since genesis. Genesis block mined 30 July 2015. |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 9 | 4 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 1,298 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum); go-ethereum v1.17.10, 23 Oct 2026; 35 releases in the last 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Geth 1.14.13, Jan 2025: fixed CVE-2025-24883 (p2p DoS); Geth 1.16.8/1.16.9, early 2026: fixed CVE-2026-22862, CVE-2026-26314 and CVE-2026-26315. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Pectra, 7 May 2025: blob target doubled (EIP-7691); Fusaka, 3 Dec 2025: PeerDAS and blob-parameter forks; gas limit raised 36M to 45M to 60M during 2025. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Pectra, 7 May 2025: EIP-7702 lets externally owned accounts set contract code (account abstraction). |
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.
122,170,166 ETH are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 58.9% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 49.2% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
Genesis allocation of 72,009,990.5 ETH (about 60M sold in the 2014 crowdsale plus about 12M to early contributors and the Ethereum Foundation) against a current total supply of 122,155,370 ETH (Etherscan supply page, 2026-10-23).
42-day public ether sale, July to September 2014, open to anyone paying in BTC (2000 ETH/BTC falling to 1337 ETH/BTC). Raised about 31,500 BTC (about $18M at the time). Two extra pools, each 0.099x the ether sold, went to early contributors and the Foundation endowment. No private or venture round in ETH.
60,102,216 ETH sold in the July-September 2014 public ether sale for about 31,500 BTC; the ~12M ETH to early contributors and the Foundation were not sold. 60,102,216 / 122,155,370 ETH current supply (Etherscan, 2026-10-23) = 49.2%.
No cut. Proof-of-work block rewards (2015-2022) went entirely to miners, and proof-of-stake issuance since the September 2022 Merge goes entirely to validators. The EIP-1559 base-fee burn is a burn, not a cut.
Sources: blog.ethereum.org · etherscan.io · ethereum.org · eips.ethereum.org · ultrasound.money. Researched 2026-10-24, high confidence.
Officially a digital commodity (SEC-CFTC, Mar 2026) AND contested — its securities status was alleged or widely disputed. Both classifications apply. Context: ~60% of supply was pre-issued in the 2014 ICO (no mining).
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Ethereum is #2 among cryptocurrencies and #2 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 Ethereum 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 46 wrapped and staked claims on Ethereum →