Stellar ranks #13 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #20: 7 of the 19 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 · 65/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #13 |
| Rank counting claims | #20 |
| Market capitalisation | $6.0B |
| Price | $0.1704 |
| Circulating supply | 35,230,412,388 XLM |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Federated |
| Consensus mechanism | Stellar Consensus Protocol (FBA) |
| Network purpose | Settlement ledger |
| 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.
B — 65 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 58 to 68 (C to B).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 8.2 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 8.2 | Federated: 8.2 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 8.2 | Federated: 8.2 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 5.2 | group average, 11 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 8.8 | 5.3 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 2.8 | no fixed maximum; 35.2 billion in circulation: supply scale 5.6, cap 0 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✓ | 12 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 | ✓ | 7 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $1.7e-8 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✓ | typical fee $0.000002; about 200 transactions a second (5.9 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; pruned nodes validate everything |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 2 | 1 of 5 passed source |
| Whitepaper privacy: keys are not tied to an identity | ✓ | Any keypair becomes an account once funded with the base reserve; stellar-core carries no identity check for lumens. |
| 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) | ✗ | stellar-core floods transactions to peers directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | No confidential transactions in the protocol. |
| 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) | 7 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.000002 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 5.9 | about 200 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 2.5 | a block every 5 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 2.96 MB limit, 355 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | SCP closes a ledger about every 5 seconds with deterministic finality, so a payment is final once its ledger closes. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | stellar-core validates from current ledger state and catches up from history archives; keeping and publishing full history is optional. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | No light-client protocol; clients trust Horizon/RPC servers. |
| 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% | ✓ | 10% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 30% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | stellar-core (Apache 2.0) is developed in the Stellar Development Foundation's repository by SDF-employed engineers, and SDF drives the protocol roadmap and CAPs. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 3,750,000 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 8.9 | 8 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes | 2 | Issued assets native to the Stellar protocol, open to any funded account, and Soroban smart contracts since February 2024. |
| Smart contracts: a general-purpose contract system | 2 | Soroban Wasm smart contracts on mainnet since February 2024 (protocol 20). |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | Native weighted multisig with thresholds, plus time bounds and minimum sequence age/ledger gap preconditions. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | Hash(x) signers combined with time bounds, which the docs name as useful for atomic cross-chain swaps. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✓ | SDEX order book (Manage Buy/Sell Offer) and constant-product liquidity pools built into the protocol. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✓ | NFT contracts on Soroban (e.g. OpenZeppelin's NonFungibleToken module); classic one-unit assets with a locked issuer also serve. |
| Decentralisation | 4.3 | section average, 6 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: Asset issuers can freeze or claw back their own issued assets, but native XLM cannot be frozen or clawed back by any party. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: stellar-core (Apache 2.0) is developed in the Stellar Development Foundation's repository by SDF-employed engineers, and SDF drives the protocol roadmap and CAPs. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 5.7 | Federated: 5.7 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | — | Not yet counted |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0 | 100% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 100B lumens were created at genesis in 2014 by the Stellar Development Foundation; the only later issuance was a 1%/yr inflation paid to existing holders via inflation-pool voting (ended 2019), and SDF burned ~55B in Nov 2019, leaving ~50.0B total (CoinGecko total 50,001,786,837; Horizon's total_coins of ~105.4B still counts burned lumens). No open minting has ever existed. source |
| Fundraising | 0 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 100% of supply was theirs to sell, 13.4% sold so far. Range 4.0-22.8%, midpoint given. Stripe bought 2B lumens for $3M at the 2014 launch (2B / ~50.0B current supply = 4.0%). SDF also funds its operations by selling lumens from its SDF Development (Direct Development) account on exchanges and in direct sales. That account fell from 11,954,850,982 to 2,570,374,111 XLM (SDF mandate page, Oct 2026), a drop of ~9.38B, but SDF publishes no cumulative sales total and part of the drop may be transfers to its 2025 restructured accounts, so (2B + up to 9.38B) / 50.0B gives an upper bound of 22.8%. Stripe provided $3M seed funding to the Stellar non-profit at launch (July 2014) and received 2% of the initial lumens (2B). The planned distribution was 50% direct sign-up, 25% non-profits, 20% bitcoin/ripple holders, 5% foundation operations. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No protocol cut. Stellar's only post-genesis issuance was the 1%/yr inflation (2014 to protocol 12, October 2019), paid to whichever accounts holders voted for via their inflation destination; the protocol did not route any of it to SDF or a treasury, and issuance has since ended. source |
| Supply & Demand | 7.1 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.5 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 43 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 8.2 | $100,701,948 traded in 24 hours; #22 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $132,887,615) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 7.7 | 1.9% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.2 | $8,475,337 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.14% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9.4 | $6.0B, 9.4 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 8.3 | futures, options and margin positions 2.7% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 5.6 | no fixed maximum; 35.2 billion 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 | 12 full years since 2014-08-05, 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 | ✓ | 798 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/stellar/stellar-core); stellar-core v30.0.0 released 2026-10-16 (v29.0.0 2026-10-05). |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Protocol 24, Oct 2025: corrected the ledger-state corruption bug introduced with Protocol 23. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Protocol 23 Whisk, 3 Sep 2025: parallel Soroban execution and in-memory state. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Protocol 25 X-Ray, 22 Jan 2026: BN254 and Poseidon host functions for zero-knowledge contracts. |
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.
35,230,412,388 XLM are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 100% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 13.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
100B lumens were created at genesis in 2014 by the Stellar Development Foundation; the only later issuance was a 1%/yr inflation paid to existing holders via inflation-pool voting (ended 2019), and SDF burned ~55B in Nov 2019, leaving ~50.0B total (CoinGecko total 50,001,786,837; Horizon's total_coins of ~105.4B still counts burned lumens). No open minting has ever existed.
Stripe provided $3M seed funding to the Stellar non-profit at launch (July 2014) and received 2% of the initial lumens (2B). The planned distribution was 50% direct sign-up, 25% non-profits, 20% bitcoin/ripple holders, 5% foundation operations.
Range 4.0-22.8%, midpoint given. Stripe bought 2B lumens for $3M at the 2014 launch (2B / ~50.0B current supply = 4.0%). SDF also funds its operations by selling lumens from its SDF Development (Direct Development) account on exchanges and in direct sales. That account fell from 11,954,850,982 to 2,570,374,111 XLM (SDF mandate page, Oct 2026), a drop of ~9.38B, but SDF publishes no cumulative sales total and part of the drop may be transfers to its 2025 restructured accounts, so (2B + up to 9.38B) / 50.0B gives an upper bound of 22.8%.
No protocol cut. Stellar's only post-genesis issuance was the 1%/yr inflation (2014 to protocol 12, October 2019), paid to whichever accounts holders voted for via their inflation destination; the protocol did not route any of it to SDF or a treasury, and issuance has since ended.
Sources: stellar.org · theblock.co · github.com · stellar.org · techcrunch.com · en.wikipedia.org. Researched 2026-10-24, low confidence.
Named a digital commodity in the joint SEC-CFTC interpretation (Mar 17, 2026).
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Stellar is #13 among cryptocurrencies and #20 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 Stellar'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).