Avalanche ranks #17 of 508 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #28: 11 of the 27 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 18 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 13 are claims on other assets and 5 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 68/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #17 |
| Rank counting claims | #28 |
| Market capitalisation | $4.0B |
| Price | $9.02 |
| Circulating supply | 443,958,846 AVAX |
| Maximum supply | 720,000,000 AVAX |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Avalanche (Snow family) |
| 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.
B — 68 out of 100, provisional (from 16 of 17 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 64 to 70 (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 | 7.2 | group average, 5 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 6 | 6 of 10 passed source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✓ | Avalanche (Snow family) |
| Limited supply | ✓ | fixed maximum of 720,000,000 |
| No pre-issuance or developer mint | ✗ | |
| No developer tax | ✓ | |
| No authority that can halt the chain or freeze funds | ✓ | No protocol-level party can freeze AVAX or halt the primary network. |
| No central team | ✗ | AvalancheGo, the only node implementation, is developed in Ava Labs' repository. |
| Fees under one cent | ✓ | typical fee $0.0005 |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | Snowman consensus finalises C-Chain blocks irreversibly in about one second. |
| UTXO ledger | ✗ | |
| Privacy built into the protocol | ✗ | |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space) | 7 | average of 4 measures source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.0005 |
| Throughput (1,000 transactions a second or more 10) | 6.7 | about 105 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 1.1 | a block every 2 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 1.84 MB limit, 551 MB per 10 minutes |
| Security (9 checks) | 5 | 5 of 9 passed source |
| Miners paid over $1 million a day | ✗ | not mined |
| Miners paid over $100,000 a day | ✗ | |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✗ | not mined |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 1.42% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 4.26% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | AvalancheGo, the only node implementation, is developed in Ava Labs' repository. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 310,902 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Decentralisation: who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Decentralisation: nodes (Source) | 9.3 | 610 active validators or block producers (source: Current) |
| Decentralisation: holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Capabilities (protocol features) | 0 | 0 of 6 passed source |
| Decentralisation | ||
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | AvalancheGo gossips transactions directly; no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | No light-client protocol for the Primary Network; wallets trust RPC servers. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✗ | AvalancheGo prunes state only (pruning-enabled) and state sync skips old history at bootstrap, but no option deletes old blocks, which running nodes keep. |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✗ | No native payment channels; fast finality is not this check. |
| Security | ||
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | No confidential transactions on the Primary Network. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Issuance | 4.9 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2.3 | 76.5% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 360M AVAX minted and allocated at genesis (sales, team, foundation, partners, airdrop, testnet incentives) against a current total supply of about 470.58M AVAX (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23; staking mints less burned fees). source |
| Fundraising | 2.3 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 76.5% of supply was theirs to sell, 24.4% sold so far. Seed sale 2.5% (18M at $0.33), private sale 3.46% (24.9M at $0.50, June 2020) and public sale options A1/A2/B 9.97% (71.8M, July 2020) of the 720M cap = ~114.7M AVAX sold. 114.7M / ~470.58M total supply (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23) = 24.4%. $6M from venture firms including a16z (2018), a $12M private token sale (June 2020), and a $42M public sale on 15 July 2020 that sold all 72M AVAX offered (10% of the 720M cap) in about 4.5 hours. Total $60M per The Block. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. New AVAX is minted only as staking rewards paid to validators and their delegators from the capped reward schedule; transaction fees are burned. There is no foundation or treasury share of issuance. source |
| Supply & Demand | 7.4 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.1 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 47 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 8.35 | $60,525,561 traded in 24 hours; #34 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 30, $98,555,528) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 8.1 | 2.2% 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 | $11,390,368 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.28% 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 | $4.0B, 9 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 5 | perpetual open interest 7.2% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 6.7 | fixed maximum supply of 720 million |
| Record | 8.3 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 9 | 2 positive, 1 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, 2024-02-23 | ✗ | C-Chain stopped finalizing blocks for about 5-6 hours (from ~11:13 UTC) because of a gossip-handling bug; resumed after validators upgraded to AvalancheGo v1.11.1. |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 6 | 6 full years since 2020-09-22, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 10 | 4 positive, 0 negative, 1 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 6,551 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/ava-labs/avalanchego); AvalancheGo v1.15.2, released 2026-10-22. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Octane, Apr 2025: ACP-176 dynamic gas target and lower fees; Granite, 19 Nov 2025: ACP-226 dynamic minimum block times. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Etna, 16 Dec 2024: ACP-77 sovereign L1 validators; Granite, Nov 2025: ACP-204 secp256r1 (passkey) precompile. |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes, +2 | ✓ | ERC-20 contracts on the C-Chain's EVM, part of the Primary Network that every validator runs, open to any account. |
| Not yet researched | ||
| Shipped a security fix in two years | – | |
Seventeen criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards group four parts: properties (ten checks drawn from the Bitcoin whitepaper), scalability (four measures), security (nine checks) and decentralisation (three scales). 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.
443,958,846 of a maximum 720,000,000 AVAX are in circulation — 61.7% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 76.5% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 24.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Nodes or validators | 610 |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
360M AVAX minted and allocated at genesis (sales, team, foundation, partners, airdrop, testnet incentives) against a current total supply of about 470.58M AVAX (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23; staking mints less burned fees).
$6M from venture firms including a16z (2018), a $12M private token sale (June 2020), and a $42M public sale on 15 July 2020 that sold all 72M AVAX offered (10% of the 720M cap) in about 4.5 hours. Total $60M per The Block.
Seed sale 2.5% (18M at $0.33), private sale 3.46% (24.9M at $0.50, June 2020) and public sale options A1/A2/B 9.97% (71.8M, July 2020) of the 720M cap = ~114.7M AVAX sold. 114.7M / ~470.58M total supply (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23) = 24.4%.
New AVAX is minted only as staking rewards paid to validators and their delegators from the capped reward schedule; transaction fees are burned. There is no foundation or treasury share of issuance.
Sources: docs.avascan.info · theblock.co · app.tokenomics.com · build.avax.network · docs.avax.network · theblock.co. Researched 2026-10-24, high 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.
Avalanche is #17 among cryptocurrencies and #28 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 11 places between Avalanche'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 5 wrapped and staked claims on Avalanche →