THORChain ranks #52 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #175: 123 of the 174 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 170 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 50% are claims on other assets, 44% are tokens and 6% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | C · 53/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #52 |
| Rank counting claims | #175 |
| Market capitalisation | $204M |
| Price | $0.6203 |
| Circulating supply | 329,306,941 RUNE |
| Maximum supply | 353,890,763 RUNE |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Tendermint (CometBFT) |
| Network purpose | Exchange chain |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
C — 53 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 48 to 58 (D to C).
| 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) | 3.4 | group average, 11 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 4.8 | 2.9 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 9.2 | fixed maximum supply of 354 million: supply scale 8.4, cap 10 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✗ | 7 full years since its first recorded price, 4 halts, freezes or reversals in five years |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | ✗ | an authority can freeze funds: Node operators can halt trading, signing or chains by Mimir vote at will, and did so to freeze THORFi redemptions (January 2025) and to pause the network for five weeks after the May 2026 exploit. |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 8 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $6.2e-9 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✗ | typical fee $0.0126 |
| 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 | ✓ | Any key can hold and send RUNE; the Cosmos SDK bank and auth modules carry 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) | ✗ | CometBFT mempool gossip relays transactions 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) | 5.3 | average of 3 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 6.3 | typical fee $0.0126 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | – | not yet measured |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 2.8 | a block every 6.16 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | – | not yet measured |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | Native RUNE transfers are final after one CometBFT block, but blocks take about 6.2 seconds, just over the 5-second bar; cross-chain swaps wait for external confirmations. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Cosmos SDK pruning strategies plus min-retain-blocks. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | CometBFT light client verifies THORChain headers from validator signatures. |
| 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% | ✓ | 11.7% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 28.8% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | THORNode (MIT, on GitLab) is developed mostly by the pseudonymous THORChain core team with Nine Realms, which ship nearly all releases. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 161,000 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 2.2 | 2 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance | 0 | No token issuance on the chain itself |
| Smart contracts | 0 | The CosmWasm App Layer (SDK v50, THORNode v3.0) is permissioned: only approved code and whitelisted deployers on mainnet; users get fixed swap and liquidity messages. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✗ | No user-level time-locked spending documented; vault keys are node TSS, not user multisig. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✗ | Cross-chain swaps settle through node-run TSS vaults, not HTLCs or adaptor signatures. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✓ | The protocol itself is a cross-chain AMM DEX: native swaps between BTC, ETH and other chains through RUNE pools. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✓ | Every THORNode runs Bifrost to observe external chains (67% agreement) and signs outbound transactions from TSS vaults with a supermajority of nodes. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✗ | No NFT module; the App Layer is permissioned. |
| Decentralisation | 3.1 | section average, 6 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 0 | An authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: Node operators can halt trading, signing or chains by Mimir vote at will, and did so to freeze THORFi redemptions (January 2025) and to pause the network for five weeks after the May 2026 exploit. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: THORNode (MIT, on GitLab) is developed mostly by the pseudonymous THORChain core team with Nine Realms, which ship nearly all releases. 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) | 0 | 100% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. All RUNE was created at launch in 2018-2019 as BEP2/ERC-20 tokens (reduced to a 500M total in Oct 2019 by burning 484.6M), including the reserve that pays node and LP emissions; no open minting has occurred (lending's net 0.2M mint aside), and today's ~353.9M total supply (CoinGecko) all stems from that issue. source |
| Fundraising | 0 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 100% of supply was theirs to sell, 42.4% sold so far. Per THORChain, 150M RUNE was allocated to private and public sales (including the July 2019 Binance DEX IDO of 20M), of which ~137M was sold over 12 months and 13M unsold was burned. Seed investors also bought from the 100M seed/team bucket; aggregators give ~26M, unconfirmed. Range 137M-163M / ~353.9M current total supply (CoinGecko) = 38.7%-46.1%; midpoint 42.4%. Seed investors (60M before the 2019 halving, 30M after) plus private sale and an IDO on Binance DEX in 2019; amounts not confirmed from a primary source. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No cut: RUNE has no minting. Node and LP block rewards were paid out of the pre-created Reserve (now near zero, EMISSIONCURVE mimir 100000), and income splits such as the 20% POL reserve share and TCY payouts come from fees, not new issuance. source |
| Supply & Demand | 8.1 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 7.8 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 24 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 5.7 | $2,515,643 traded in 24 hours; #201 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $6,886,784) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 8.9 | 3.0% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 8.5 | $706,800 within 2% of the price on 6 exchanges, 0.35% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 5.8 | $204M, 5.8 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 7.7 | futures, options and margin positions 5.4% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 8.4 | fixed maximum supply of 354 million |
| Record | 7.7 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 9 | 2 positive, 4 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, 2022-10-27 | ✗ | Chain halted for about 20 hours after a non-determinism bug caused nodes to disagree on memo strings; resumed 2022-10-28. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2023-03-28 | ✗ | Node operators halted all trading for several hours over a reported vulnerability in a dependency. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2025-01-24 | ✗ | Node operators voted to freeze THORFi Lending and Savers redemptions (~$200M of liabilities); on 2025-02-03 nodes adopted Proposal 6 to wind THORFi down and convert claims to TCY tokens. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2026-05-15 | ✗ | After a ~$10.7M exploit, trading and signing were paused (automatic solvency check, then node Mimir) for about five weeks while patches and a vault migration were deployed. |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 7 | 7 full years since 2019-07-23, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 7 | 3 positive, 1 negative, 1 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 3,012 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (gitlab.com/thorchain/thornode); THORNode v3.21.0 released 2026-10-19 (GitLab). |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | v3.15.0, Jan 2026: private security patches; v3.19 hardening after the May 2026 exploit. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | 2025: CosmWasm app layer on THORChain mainnet (whitelisted contracts). |
| Negative | ||
| Exploit of the chain, 2026-05-15, −1 | ✗ | A newly churned node operator exploited missing proof checks in THORChain's GG20 threshold-signature code to rebuild one Asgard vault key and take about $10.7M across several chains; trading and signing paused about five weeks. |
| Not yet researched | ||
| 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.
329,306,941 of a maximum 353,890,763 RUNE are in circulation — 93.1% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 100% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 42.4% 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 |
All RUNE was created at launch in 2018-2019 as BEP2/ERC-20 tokens (reduced to a 500M total in Oct 2019 by burning 484.6M), including the reserve that pays node and LP emissions; no open minting has occurred (lending's net 0.2M mint aside), and today's ~353.9M total supply (CoinGecko) all stems from that issue.
Seed investors (60M before the 2019 halving, 30M after) plus private sale and an IDO on Binance DEX in 2019; amounts not confirmed from a primary source.
Per THORChain, 150M RUNE was allocated to private and public sales (including the July 2019 Binance DEX IDO of 20M), of which ~137M was sold over 12 months and 13M unsold was burned. Seed investors also bought from the 100M seed/team bucket; aggregators give ~26M, unconfirmed. Range 137M-163M / ~353.9M current total supply (CoinGecko) = 38.7%-46.1%; midpoint 42.4%.
No cut: RUNE has no minting. Node and LP block rewards were paid out of the pre-created Reserve (now near zero, EMISSIONCURVE mimir 100000), and income splits such as the 20% POL reserve share and TCY payouts come from fees, not new issuance.
Sources: blog.thorchain.org · blog.thorchain.org · blog.thorchain.org · thorchain-thornode-lb-1.thorwallet.org · docs.thorchain.org · blog.thorchain.org. Researched 2026-10-24, low confidence.
No SEC/CFTC determination — unclassified.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
THORChain is #52 among cryptocurrencies and #175 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 123 places between THORChain'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).