Solana ranks #5 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #7: 2 of the 6 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 2 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, all are claims on other assets.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 74/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #5 |
| Rank counting claims | #7 |
| Market capitalisation | $59.5B |
| Price | $100.92 |
| Circulating supply | 589,928,333 SOL |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Tower BFT + Proof of History |
| 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 — 74 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 70 to 76 (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) | 6.9 | group average, 12 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 7.3 | 4.4 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 4.1 | no fixed maximum; 590 million in circulation: supply scale 8.1, cap 0 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✗ | 6 full years since its first recorded price, 5 halts, freezes or reversals 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 | ✓ | 9 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $1.0e-7 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✓ | typical fee $0.0006; about 13,000 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; pruned nodes validate everything |
| 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) | ✗ | Transactions are forwarded straight to leaders over QUIC; no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | Solana confidential transfers are a Token-2022 extension for SPL tokens; native SOL transfers cannot hide amounts. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | Confidential transfers leave sender and receiver accounts visible. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 7.3 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.0006 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 10 | about 13,000 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 0.4 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 31.6 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 47300 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | Blocks are optimistically confirmed by two-thirds of stake within about a second; no optimistically confirmed block has been rolled back, though rooted finality takes roughly 13 s on the Tower BFT path. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Agave validators boot from a recent snapshot and cap the stored ledger with --limit-ledger-size; full history lives in external archives. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | No light-client protocol on mainnet; wallets trust RPC servers. |
| 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% | ✓ | 3.91% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 10.6% |
| More than one maintained client | ✓ | 2 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | The Agave client is developed by Anza and the Firedancer client by Jump Crypto; protocol changes go through the public SIMD process. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 114,456,390 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 | SPL tokens through the on-chain Token and Token-2022 programs, open to any account. |
| Smart contracts: a general-purpose contract system | 2 | On-chain programs (sBPF) deployable by any account, running DEXs, lending and games on mainnet. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | Through programs: Squads multisig with a configurable time lock on approved transactions. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | Garden's Solana HTLC program (SHA-256 secret hash, slot-based expiry and refund) used for cross-chain swaps. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | No exchange in the runtime; Raydium, Orca and others are user programs. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No protocol messaging; Wormhole and other bridges are third-party guardian or relayer networks. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✓ | NFTs are SPL Token program mints with supply 1, zero decimals and no mint authority, described by the Token Metadata or Core programs. |
| Decentralisation | 7.5 | section average, 7 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: Native SOL has no freeze or blacklist authority; past outages were failures followed by coordinated validator restarts, not a halt power held by any party. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: The Agave client is developed by Anza and the Firedancer client by Jump Crypto; protocol changes go through the public SIMD process. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 9.4 | 659 active validators or block producers (source: Bitwise) |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2.1 | 79.5% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 500M SOL were created in the genesis block (16 Mar 2020) and fully allocated (seed, founding, validator and strategic sales, CoinList auction, team, foundation, community reserve), against a total supply of 628,949,550 SOL (CoinMarketCap via Kalkine, 22 Jun 2026); the foundation's May 2020 removal of 11.36M SOL is ignored, as the whole genesis allocation counts. source |
| Fundraising | 2.1 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 79.5% of supply was theirs to sell, 30.1% sold so far. Genesis sales in 2018-2020: seed 81.16M, founding 64.6M, validator 25.9M and strategic 9.4M SOL, plus the 8M SOL CoinList auction (Mar 2020) = 189.06M SOL. Against 628.95M total supply (CoinMarketCap, Jun 2026) = 30.1%; using the later ~632.5M CMC figure it is 29.9%. Later FTX-estate sales of locked SOL are third-party sales and are excluded. Private seed, founding, validator and strategic sales (Fidelity breakdown: 81.2M, 64.6M, 25.9M and 9.4M SOL), plus a public CoinList Dutch auction of 8M SOL to non-US buyers on 24 Mar 2020 at $0.22, which raised $1.76M. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. Solana's protocol inflation (disinflationary schedule since Feb 2021) is paid entirely to validators and the stakers delegated to them; there is no foundation, treasury or developer share. Half of base fees are burned, which is not a cut. source |
| Supply & Demand | 8.3 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.5 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 47 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 9.8 | $642,201,983 traded in 24 hours; #5 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $819,827,448) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 6.9 | 1.3% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.3 | $92,021,894 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.15% 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 | $60B, at the top of the scale |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 7.2 | futures, options and margin positions 7.6% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 8.1 | no fixed maximum; 590 million in circulation |
| Record | 7.7 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 9 | 2 positive, 5 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| Negative record | ||
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2022-05-01 | ✗ | Mainnet stopped producing blocks for about 7 hours under NFT-mint bot spam; validators coordinated a restart. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2022-06-01 | ✗ | About 4.5-hour halt from a durable-nonce transaction bug; validators restarted the cluster with durable nonces disabled. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2022-09-30 | ✗ | About 8-hour halt after a misconfigured validator ran duplicate instances; validators coordinated a restart. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2023-02-25 | ✗ | Roughly 19-hour degradation and halt from block-forwarding overload; validators restarted on downgraded v1.13.6. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2024-02-06 | ✗ | Block production stopped for about 5 hours (09:53-14:57 UTC) from a JIT-cache bug; validators restarted on v1.17.20. |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 6 | 6 full years since 2020-04-10, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 8 | 3 positive, 0 negative, 1 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 4,742 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/anza-xyz/agave); Agave (reference validator) v4.3.2, released 2026-10-21; v4.4 in release candidate. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Agave patches, Apr-May 2025: fixed the ZK ElGamal proof bug; Agave 3.0.14, Jan 2026: fixed vote-processing vulnerabilities. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Block compute limit raised to 60M CU (Jul 2025) and to 100M CU (SIMD-0286, 29 Jul 2026). |
| Not yet researched | ||
| Shipped a new capability for users 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.
589,928,333 SOL are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 79.5% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 30.1% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Nodes or validators | 659 |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
500M SOL were created in the genesis block (16 Mar 2020) and fully allocated (seed, founding, validator and strategic sales, CoinList auction, team, foundation, community reserve), against a total supply of 628,949,550 SOL (CoinMarketCap via Kalkine, 22 Jun 2026); the foundation's May 2020 removal of 11.36M SOL is ignored, as the whole genesis allocation counts.
Private seed, founding, validator and strategic sales (Fidelity breakdown: 81.2M, 64.6M, 25.9M and 9.4M SOL), plus a public CoinList Dutch auction of 8M SOL to non-US buyers on 24 Mar 2020 at $0.22, which raised $1.76M.
Genesis sales in 2018-2020: seed 81.16M, founding 64.6M, validator 25.9M and strategic 9.4M SOL, plus the 8M SOL CoinList auction (Mar 2020) = 189.06M SOL. Against 628.95M total supply (CoinMarketCap, Jun 2026) = 30.1%; using the later ~632.5M CMC figure it is 29.9%. Later FTX-estate sales of locked SOL are third-party sales and are excluded.
Solana's protocol inflation (disinflationary schedule since Feb 2021) is paid entirely to validators and the stakers delegated to them; there is no foundation, treasury or developer share. Half of base fees are burned, which is not a cut.
Sources: coincodex.com · tokenomist.ai · coinmarketcap.com · solana.com · solana.com · docs.anza.xyz. Researched 2026-10-24, medium confidence.
Officially a digital commodity (SEC-CFTC, Mar 2026) AND contested — its securities status was alleged or widely disputed. Both classifications apply. Context: pre-issued via Solana Labs/Foundation sales (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.
Solana is #5 among cryptocurrencies and #7 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 2 places between Solana'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 30 wrapped and staked claims on Solana →