How crypto works when it is checked rather than assumed: forks tested on real nodes, market cycles read from the ranking's own data, security records such as which wallets lost user funds, and guides to where a DEX runs or which browsers open Web3 domains. The blog argues for the rules the ranking is built on; the journal tests them against what happens. Every piece is dated and links the sources it rests on.
Bitcoin Cash is usually described as a 2017 coin airdropped to Bitcoin holders. Its chain starts at the same 2009 genesis block as BTC's, and on 1 August 2017 one chain became two branches. Why "airdrop" assumes an answer nobody can prove, what each branch changed, and how Ethereum Classic shows that the name and the original rules can end up on different chains.
The CoinSpectrum Grade scores turnover (daily volume as a share of market cap) and futures exposure. The idea behind both was that a thinly traded coin, or one carried by futures, is the more volatile one. Six months of prices on over a hundred coins say otherwise for turnover: higher turnover went with higher volatility at every size. Futures open interest went with volatility in the same period but did not predict the next quarter. Monero was not calmer than its peers; it grew with shallow falls.
Seven ranking sites asked the same question — how many cryptocurrencies exist — answer anywhere from a few hundred to 63.9 million. What CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, CoinPaprika, CryptoSlate, LiveCoinWatch, CoinCodex and CoinSpectrum each count, what each does best, and which to use for what.
Bitcoin, Litecoin, Zcash, Kaspa and Cardano have a maximum supply; Ethereum, Monero, Dogecoin and Solana do not. How each cap works, why the largest uncapped coins chose a tail or an inflation rate instead, the split by consensus family, and what a cap does not say about who received the coins.
BIP-110 needed 55% of miners and got 2.5%. Its nodes split off at block 961,632 on 8 August 2026, mined eight SHA-256 blocks in twenty days, then switched to BLAKE2b proof of work. The chain is alive, trades as BTCB2 around $500, copies every pre-split BTC balance — and by the counting rule it is a separate cryptocurrency. Why the site shows it without a market cap, and what the episode says about mandatory signalling.
Price and rank changes across the 239 pure cryptocurrencies in the 58-day window since 23 August 2026 — read directly from the site's own snapshot diff, in the site's own voice, over its own ranking.
Fourteen platforms side by side — CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, CoinPaprika, CryptoSlate, LiveCoinWatch, CoinCodex, CoinStats, Messari, DefiLlama, Glassnode, Nansen, TradingView, Token Terminal, Dune and CoinSpectrum: what each covers, what is free, what the paid plans cost, and which to use for what.
Most price sites sort only by market cap. Which platforms let a reader filter by consensus mechanism, mining algorithm, or coin versus token — and how CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, CoinPaprika, CryptoSlate and CoinSpectrum each do it.
Which trackers work without an account or an email, where each keeps your holdings, how holdings get in, what the free tier allows, and which have leaked customer data: CoinStats, Delta, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, CoinTracker, Koinly, Kubera, Rotki, Zerion, Ghostfolio and CoinSpectrum.
A few hundred cryptocurrencies have their own blockchain and their own consensus; the tens of thousands quoted elsewhere add tokens, stablecoins and wrapped copies. The live count, what separates a native coin from a token, and the breakdown by consensus family.
Only the thefts where the wallet itself failed: Coldcard's guessable seeds, the implanted Ledgers sold through CryptoBilis, Atomic Wallet, Trust Wallet's backdoored extension, Safe and Bybit, and the customer-data leaks at Ledger, Trezor and SafePal. Hardware and software wallets compared in two tables, and why a multisig across different makers is the answer.
Theseus Navigator, LibreWeb, Brave, Opera, Osiris, Puma and Aloha: which Web3 domains each one opens without an extension, from Bitcoin Cash Domain Names (.bch, .x) and Freedom Names (.fn) to .eth, .sol and .crypto, who answers the lookup, and where to download each. Plus the .x name that two registries both issue.
Most of the largest cryptocurrencies cannot be traded as themselves on a DEX on their own chain: a "Bitcoin" pool on a DEX is almost always a token. Sixteen coins and the venues that trade each one as itself — DEXes on its own chain, THORChain and Chainflip across chains, and the swap services whose published lists name it — and the three questions the DEX tab now asks separately.
The 2021 cycle bottomed at $15.6k, below the 2017 peak of $19.8k — the first time in a decade a cycle low breached the previous cycle's high. In 2026 it is happening again: the 2025 cycle's June low of $58k sits 16% below the 2021 peak of $69k. The timing metric that projects an Oct–Nov 2026 confirmed bottom, the five-epoch shrinking arc it rests on, and the 2017 cycle's +240% mid-cycle bounce that warns the current +48% recovery off $58k may not be proof of the bottom yet.
The companion post argued from the spec that SegWit was a hard fork by function. This one runs the experiment. Ten Bitcoin Core regtest nodes at six hashpower ratios; direct anyone-can-spend and BIP144 stripping tests on real Bitcoin Core 0.12.1; the precise split trigger isolated. Both sides validate honestly by their own rules; the rules diverge; hashpower and market chose the 2017 outcome, not correctness.
SegWit is universally called a soft fork because legacy nodes did not crash when it activated. That standard is a poor test. Legacy nodes lost the ability to verify signatures the whitepaper's Section 2 says are the definition of ownership, and the activation was forced on miners by economic threat. On the mechanics, it was a hard fork wearing a soft-fork label.
On 1 August 2017 the network activated a block-size upgrade; three weeks later a separate SegWit upgrade activated on the same network. Calling one "Bitcoin" and the other "a fork of Bitcoin" is inheritance by ticker, not by protocol history — the site's stated position, with the Satoshi block-size scaling quote and the whitepaper signature argument.
Two words for two things that get treated as synonyms in casual writing. A hard fork is a protocol upgrade. A chain split is what happens when a hard fork doesn't get the coordination it needs and two groups of nodes keep running two versions. Same mechanism at activation, different outcome in the days that follow.
Same protocol lineage, same SHA-256, same 21-million cap — and three separate cryptocurrencies in the ranking. Applying the counting rule to its hardest case: each independently has its own chain and its own consensus, and none of the reasons people give for treating them as one survive the test.
Twenty-eight chains carry a hashrate figure and they use twenty different algorithms. A single ranking that adds them all up ranks nothing at all — the honest table has twenty entries, most with one chain in them.
Every figure in a Journal post is stamped with the data build it was read from — the site rebuilds every six hours, so a number here will drift from the current ranking. The stamp is there so you can tell how far.
The Blog is the argument for the site's four counting rules — small, opinionated, rarely added to. The Journal is the record of what the data does under those rules — dated, factual, updated regularly. Read the blog for the reasoning and the journal for what it looks like on any given week.