NEAR Protocol ranks #12 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #19: 7 of the 18 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 12 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 9 are claims on other assets and 3 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 70/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #12 |
| Rank counting claims | #19 |
| Market capitalisation | $6.0B |
| Price | $4.60 |
| Circulating supply | 1,310,187,805 NEAR |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Nightshade (Doomslug) |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| 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 — 70 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 72 (B 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) | 6.1 | 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 | 3.8 | no fixed maximum; 1.31 billion in circulation: supply scale 7.6, cap 0 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✓ | 6 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 | ✓ | 24 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $4.6e-24 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✓ | typical fee $0.0002; about 33,000 transactions a second (10 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 | ✓ | Implicit accounts come from any ed25519 key and named accounts can be registered by anyone; nearcore 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) | ✗ | nearcore forwards transactions to chunk producers directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| 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 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.0002 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 10 | about 33,000 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 0.6 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 2.24 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 2240 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 10 | 3 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | Doomslug blocks every ~0.6 s reach BFT finality within about two blocks, roughly 1–2 seconds. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | nearcore garbage-collects data older than gc_num_epochs_to_keep (default 5 epochs); only archival nodes keep full history. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Nightshade light-client spec: block-producer approvals and Merkle proofs verified from light block headers. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 5 | 5 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% | ✓ | 5.61% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 14.15% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | nearcore, the only full-node implementation, is developed by Near One under the NEAR Foundation umbrella. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 803,769 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 | NEP-141 fungible-token contracts on its Wasm runtime, open to any account. |
| Smart contracts: a general-purpose contract system | 2 | Wasm contracts deployable by any account on the NEAR runtime. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | Through contracts: the K-of-N multisig contract and the lockup contract, which escrows tokens until a timestamp-based schedule. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | Wasm contracts can hold funds against a hash preimage with a timeout refund (HTLC). |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | No exchange in the protocol; Ref Finance and others are contracts. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No validator-verified messaging in the protocol; bridges are separately deployed contracts. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✓ | NEP-171 NFT contracts on the Wasm runtime. |
| Decentralisation | 6 | section average, 7 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level freeze, blacklist or halt authority over ordinary accounts. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: nearcore, the only full-node implementation, is developed by Near One under the NEAR Foundation umbrella. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 8.7 | 397 active validators or block producers (source: Current) |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2.4 | 76.4% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 1,000,000,000 NEAR created at genesis on 22 April 2020, all allocated (team, backers, foundation, grants, community sale, early ecosystem), against a current total supply of 1,309,745,711 NEAR (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23). source |
| Fundraising | 2.4 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 76.4% of supply was theirs to sell, 29.2% sold so far. Genesis (Apr 2020) sales: backers 17.6% + small backers 6.1% (176M + 61M) and the Aug 2020 CoinList community sale ~120M = 357M NEAR; the NEAR Foundation also sold treasury tokens in the Jan 2022 $150M (Three Arrows) and Apr 2022 $350M (Tiger Global) rounds, units undisclosed (estimated ~30-50M at ~$10-15). 357M-407M / 1,309,745,711 NEAR (2026-10-23) = 27.3-31.1%, midpoint 29.2%. Prior backers came in through convertible notes and private rounds; no single backer holds more than 3.5% of the initial supply (NEAR blog). Secondary breakdowns list a pre-seed round at 2.16% and private round 2 at 8.43%. A CoinList community sale in 2020 sold about 120M NEAR (12%) in tiers at $0.29, $0.34 and $0.40. Total dollars raised were not verified here. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.8 | Developer share: about 2.4% of today's supply received so far; 10% of each new block reward goes to them today. Each epoch, 10% of the newly minted NEAR goes to the protocol treasury account (treasury.near). The rate is hard-coded at 1/10 for mainnet in nearcore's reward_calculator.rs, and the treasury is paid in full even when validator uptime cuts their share. The rule has applied since genesis (April 2020) and was unchanged when max inflation was halved from 5% to 2.5% on 30 Oct 2025. Net minting is 1,309.82M - 1,000M = 309.8M, plus a few million burned in fees, so the treasury has received roughly 31M, about 2.4% of supply. source |
| Supply & Demand | 8.1 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.7 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 41 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 9.4 | $249,754,170 traded in 24 hours; #8 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $501,498,589) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.3 | 6.8% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 8.2 | $17,414,153 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.29% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 1 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9.5 | $6.0B, 9.5 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 5.8 | futures, options and margin positions 18% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 7.6 | no fixed maximum; 1.31 billion 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) | 6 | 6 full years since 2020-10-14, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 9 | 4 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 2,592 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/near/nearcore); nearcore 2.14.0-rc.6 published 2026-10-22, with frequent stable 2.x releases through 2026. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | nearcore 2.10.7 (Mar 2026) and 2.13.4 (Sep 2026): fixed critical node crash/DoS flaws. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | 600 ms blocks with 1.2 s finality, May 2025; shards raised to 9 and automatic resharding in nearcore 2.13, 2026. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | nearcore 2.13, 2026: standardized post-quantum signature scheme for accounts. |
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.
1,310,187,805 NEAR are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 76.4% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 29.2% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 2.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 10% |
| Nodes or validators | 397 |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
1,000,000,000 NEAR created at genesis on 22 April 2020, all allocated (team, backers, foundation, grants, community sale, early ecosystem), against a current total supply of 1,309,745,711 NEAR (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23).
Prior backers came in through convertible notes and private rounds; no single backer holds more than 3.5% of the initial supply (NEAR blog). Secondary breakdowns list a pre-seed round at 2.16% and private round 2 at 8.43%. A CoinList community sale in 2020 sold about 120M NEAR (12%) in tiers at $0.29, $0.34 and $0.40. Total dollars raised were not verified here.
Genesis (Apr 2020) sales: backers 17.6% + small backers 6.1% (176M + 61M) and the Aug 2020 CoinList community sale ~120M = 357M NEAR; the NEAR Foundation also sold treasury tokens in the Jan 2022 $150M (Three Arrows) and Apr 2022 $350M (Tiger Global) rounds, units undisclosed (estimated ~30-50M at ~$10-15). 357M-407M / 1,309,745,711 NEAR (2026-10-23) = 27.3-31.1%, midpoint 29.2%.
Each epoch, 10% of the newly minted NEAR goes to the protocol treasury account (treasury.near). The rate is hard-coded at 1/10 for mainnet in nearcore's reward_calculator.rs, and the treasury is paid in full even when validator uptime cuts their share. The rule has applied since genesis (April 2020) and was unchanged when max inflation was halved from 5% to 2.5% on 30 Oct 2025. Net minting is 1,309.82M - 1,000M = 309.8M, plus a few million burned in fees, so the treasury has received roughly 31M, about 2.4% of supply.
Sources: near.org · research.coinone.co.kr · betoken.substack.com · github.com · nomicon.io · blog.nearone.org. Researched 2026-10-24, low 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.
NEAR Protocol is #12 among cryptocurrencies and #19 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 7 places between NEAR Protocol'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 3 wrapped and staked claims on NEAR Protocol →