Filecoin ranks #32 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #85: 53 of the 84 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 72 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 57% are claims on other assets, 38% are tokens and 6% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 71/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #32 |
| Rank counting claims | #85 |
| Market capitalisation | $747M |
| Price | $0.8907 |
| Circulating supply | 838,487,227 FIL |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Space / Storage |
| Consensus mechanism | PoRep + PoSt (Expected Consensus) |
| Network purpose | Decentralized storage |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
| Regulatory class | Contested |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
B — 71 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 67 to 73 (B to B).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 5.5 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 5.5 | Proof of space: 5.5 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 5.5 | Proof of space: 5.5 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 6.9 | group average, 12 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 9 | 5.4 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 4 | no fixed maximum; 838 million in circulation: supply scale 7.9, cap 0 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✓ | 8 full years since its first recorded price, no halt, freeze or reversal in five years |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | ✓ | no authority can freeze, blacklist or set apart a coin |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 18 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $8.9e-19 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✓ | typical fee $0.000005; about 1,360 transactions a second (9 on the throughput scale; 5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Verifiability: open-source nodes and checking without a trusted server | ✓ | node software open source; light clients verify from headers or proofs |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 2 | 1 of 5 passed source |
| Whitepaper privacy: keys are not tied to an identity | ✓ | Anyone can create keys and receive and send coins; the protocol carries no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger: a new key for each payment, no account linking every coin | ✗ | |
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | Lotus publishes messages over libp2p GossipSub directly. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | No confidential transactions. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 8.2 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.000005 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 9 | about 1,360 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 5.3 | a block every 30 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 38.5 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 769 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | 30 s epochs; F3 fast finality brings finality to minutes, not seconds. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Lotus SplitStore keeps a hot store of recent state and discards cold chain history; lite nodes are separate. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | F3 fast finality (FIP-0086, 2025): finality certificates signed by at least 2/3 of power let light clients verify finalized tipsets. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 6 | 6 of 9 points source |
| Miners paid a day ($1,000 0, $10 million or more 10), 2 points | 0 | not mined |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✗ | not mined |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 1.28% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 3.3% |
| More than one maintained client | ✓ | 3 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Three independent clients: Lotus (FilOz, ex-Protocol Labs), Forest (ChainSafe) and Venus (IPFSForce); changes go through FIPs. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 41,399 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 7.8 | 7 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes | 2 | ERC-20 contracts on the Filecoin EVM (FEVM), open to any account since the March 2023 network upgrade (nv18). |
| Smart contracts: a general-purpose contract system | 2 | The Filecoin Virtual Machine lets users deploy their own contracts (FEVM, since the nv18 upgrade of March 2023). |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | Built-in multisig actor plus timelock contracts on the FEVM. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | FEVM can run EVM HTLC contracts (hash lock plus timelock refund). |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | No exchange among the built-in actors. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains; bridges are third-party. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✓ | ERC-721 contracts on the FEVM. |
| Decentralisation | 7.1 | section average, 7 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No party can freeze or claw back FIL; no deliberate halts. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: Three independent clients: Lotus (FilOz, ex-Protocol Labs), Forest (ChainSafe) and Venus (IPFSForce); changes go through FIPs. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 2.9 | Proof of space: 2.9 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 8.9 | 458 reachable nodes (source: Active) |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 3.9 | 61% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Non-mining genesis allocations total 600M FIL (10% fundraising, 15% Protocol Labs, 5% Filecoin Foundation, of the 2B base), now essentially fully vested, against a current total supply (mined plus vested, net of burns) of 983.68M FIL (Filfox API, 2026-10-23). source |
| Fundraising | 3.9 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 61% of supply was theirs to sell, 15.2% sold so far. The Filecoin spec says 7.5% of FIL_BASE (150M of 2B) was sold in the 2017 presale and SAFT sale; the other 2.5% of the fundraising bucket was kept for ecosystem development and possible future fundraising, with no sale recorded. 150M / 983.68M total supply (Filfox, 2026-10-23) = 15.2%. $52M advisor/presale (Sequoia, a16z, USV and others) plus a SAFT sale on CoinList to accredited investors in August and September 2017. Filecoin says the total was $205.8M including the presale; The Block and CoinDesk report $257M ($205M plus $52M). source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No cut. New FIL is minted only as block rewards to storage providers from the 1.1B mining allocation (simple plus baseline minting); the 300M mining reserve is unminted and has not been released, and Protocol Labs/Filecoin Foundation allocations are genesis vesting, not a share of block rewards. source |
| Supply & Demand | 8 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.1 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 45 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 7.5 | $25,347,322 traded in 24 hours; #47 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $54,520,223) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.5 | 6.1% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 9 | $3,841,556 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.51% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 7.2 | $747M, 7.2 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 5.5 | futures, options and margin positions 21% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 7.9 | no fixed maximum; 838 million in circulation |
| Record | 8.3 | 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) | 8 | 8 full years since 2017-11-23, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 7 | 2 positive, 0 negative, 2 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 444 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/filecoin-project/lotus); filecoin-project/lotus v1.38.3, 2026-10-21; 41 stable releases in 24 months. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | nv25 Teep, Apr-May 2025: FIP-0097 adds EIP-1153 transient storage to the FEVM. |
| Not yet researched | ||
| Shipped a security fix in two years | – | |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years | – | |
Twenty criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards have six sections: sound money qualities (six checks: scarcity, durability, fungibility, divisibility, portability, verifiability), privacy (five checks), scalability (four measures and three features), security (miner pay and seven checks), programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) and decentralisation (censorship resistance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share). 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.
838,487,227 FIL are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 61% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 15.2% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Nodes or validators | 458 |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
Non-mining genesis allocations total 600M FIL (10% fundraising, 15% Protocol Labs, 5% Filecoin Foundation, of the 2B base), now essentially fully vested, against a current total supply (mined plus vested, net of burns) of 983.68M FIL (Filfox API, 2026-10-23).
$52M advisor/presale (Sequoia, a16z, USV and others) plus a SAFT sale on CoinList to accredited investors in August and September 2017. Filecoin says the total was $205.8M including the presale; The Block and CoinDesk report $257M ($205M plus $52M).
The Filecoin spec says 7.5% of FIL_BASE (150M of 2B) was sold in the 2017 presale and SAFT sale; the other 2.5% of the fundraising bucket was kept for ecosystem development and possible future fundraising, with no sale recorded. 150M / 983.68M total supply (Filfox, 2026-10-23) = 15.2%.
No cut. New FIL is minted only as block rewards to storage providers from the 1.1B mining allocation (simple plus baseline minting); the 300M mining reserve is unminted and has not been released, and Protocol Labs/Filecoin Foundation allocations are genesis vesting, not a share of block rewards.
Sources: spec.filecoin.io · bclplaw.com · spec.filecoin.io · docs.filecoin.io · filecoin.io · coindesk.com. Researched 2026-10-24, high confidence.
Alleged an unregistered security by the SEC (2023 complaint); not named a commodity in 2026 and not adjudicated — status unsettled.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Filecoin is #32 among cryptocurrencies and #85 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 53 places between Filecoin'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).
See the 1 wrapped and staked claim on Filecoin →