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BitShares (BTS)

BitShares ranks #196 of 489 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #1510: 1314 of the 1509 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 1745 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 75% are tokens, 19% are claims on other assets and 6% are memecoins.

CoinSpectrum Grade	B · 65/100 · provisional
Rank among cryptocurrencies	#196
Rank counting claims	#1510
Market capitalisation	$3M
Price	$0.000913
Circulating supply	2,995,060,000 BTS
Maximum supply	3,600,570,502 BTS
Consensus family	Proof of Stake
Consensus mechanism	DPoS (graphene)
Network purpose	Financial ledger
Ledger type	Single-asset ledger
Launch distribution	Presale

Market figures from the 29 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.

CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)

B — 65 out of 100, provisional (from 12 of 12 criteria, 29 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 65 to 66 (B to B).

Criterion	Score	Basis
Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source)	9.1	group average
By family (all its chains' market cap)	9.1	Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains
By leader (its largest chain's market cap)	9.1	Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap
Cryptocurrency Standards (Source)	5.4	group average
Sound Money Properties (6 checks) (Source)	7.3	4.4 of 6 points source
Scarcity (Limited supply · Store of value · Whitepaper §6)	3.5	fixed maximum supply of 3.6 billion, but an issuer or vote can mint outside the schedule: supply scale 7, cap 0
Durability (Sustainability · Store of value)	✓	12 full years since its first recorded price, no halt, freeze or reversal in five years
Fungibility (Interchangeability · Unit of account)	✓	every unit identical and worth any other
Portability (Scalability · Medium of exchange)	✓	typical fee $0.00125; about 4,444 transactions a second, 10 on the throughput scale (5 is the busiest networks' median demand)
Divisibility (Flexibility · Unit of account)	✓	5 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $9.1e-9
Verifiability (Authenticity check · Store of value · Whitepaper §8)	✗	node software open source; no light clients or pruned nodes
Privacy (5 checks)	2	1 of 5 passed source
Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10)	✓	Accounts are registered on chain by any existing account (with a fee) and controlled by user keys, with no identity check.
UTXO ledger (A new key for each payment · Whitepaper §2, §9)	✗
Network privacy (Origin hidden by default)	✗	Graphene P2P relays transactions directly; no Dandelion or Tor.
Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential)	✗	Balances and transfers are public on-chain objects.
Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden)	✗	Sender and receiver accounts are public.
Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features)	6.3	average of 5 parts source
Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0)	9.7	typical fee $0.00125
Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5)	10	about 4,444 simple transactions a second
Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side)	1.7	a block every 3 seconds
Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10)	10	2 MB limit, 400 MB per 10 minutes
Features (3 checks)	0	0 of 3 passed
Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper §11)	✗	Blocks are every 3 s, but irreversibility needs 2/3 of the 17 witnesses to build on a block; last_irreversible_block_num ran 14 blocks (~42 s) behind head on 2026-10-26.
Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7)	✗	witness_node replays and keeps the full block log; only account-history plugins can be trimmed.
Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8)	✗	No proof-based light client; wallets connect to API nodes.
Security (miner pay, pool diversity, network activity and 4 checks)	4.9	4.9 of 10 points source
Miner pay (A day, $1,000 0 to $10 million 10; 2 points)	0	not mined
Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points)	8.4	largest 29.4%, largest three 41.2%
Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points)	6.2	about 27,600 transactions a day
Own hashrate (Half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined)	✗	not mined
Clients (More than one maintained)	✗	1
Open source (Node software)	✓	bitshares-core (MIT) is maintained by volunteer and worker-funded developers (mainly abitmore) under the community bitshares GitHub organisation; no company controls it.
No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years)	✓
Decentralisation (8 checks and scales) (Source)	6.6	average of 7 parts
Censorship resistant (Source)	10	No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: The core asset BTS has no issuer whitelist or override permissions, and the elected committee can change chain parameters but cannot freeze or seize ordinary users' BTS. source
No central team (Source)	10	No central team: bitshares-core (MIT) is maintained by volunteer and worker-funded developers (mainly abitmore) under the community bitshares GitHub organisation; no company controls it. source
Who can mint (Source)	4	Gated by election: a delegated set voted in by holders produces blocks
Nodes (Source)	4.1	17 active validators or block producers (source: Active)
Holder concentration (Source)	–	Not yet measured
Premine (allocated at launch)	1.9	80.5% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. The BitShares 2.0 genesis (October 2015) carried over ~2.412B BTS from BitShares 1.0. BTS 1.0 was split 50% to AngelShares (AGS) donors and 50% to ProtoShares (PTS) holders as a founders' airdrop, with later merges of DNS and Follow My Vote. Against ~2.995B current supply, 2.412/2.995 = about 80.5%. source
Fundraising (share sold)	6.7	Sold by its issuer or insiders: 33% of supply sold. AngelShares (AGS) donation drive from December 2013 into 2014, in BTC and PTS, to Invictus Innovations, for 50% of the initial BTS. The BTC total was not found. source
Developer share (after launch)	9.4	Developer share: about 6.4% of today's supply received so far; no share of new block rewards today. BitShares 2.0 mints a budget from the reserve (unissued supply up to the 3.6B max) at each hourly maintenance: witness pay to block producers plus pay for holder-voted workers, a treasury-like cut. Core-development and committee-owned workers (including committee dividend and market-operation funds) were paid mainly from 2015 to 2020; since 2021 only refund and threshold workers sit above the line, so real worker pay is about 0 today. Arithmetic: worker budget minus leftover, summed over all 96,683 budget records (2.13.x, Oct 2015 to Oct 2026), is 520.69M BTS; minus 330.22M returned to the reserve by refund/burn workers (total_burned) = 190.47M / 2,996.93M current supply = 6.4%. source
Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks)	6.7	6 of 9 points source
Token issuance (At protocol level)	2	User-Issued Assets (UIAs), native Graphene objects any account can create for a fee.
Smart contracts	0	Graphene chain with fixed operations (orders, assets, HTLCs, pools, credit offers); no user-deployable contracts or script.
Multisig and time locks (Without a third party)	✓	Weighted multi-signature account authorities, plus htlc_create/redeem operations whose timeout refunds the sender.
Atomic swaps (With other chains)	✓	Native HTLC operations (htlc_create, htlc_redeem, htlc_extend) in the protocol, with hash preimage and timeout.
Native exchange (Built into the protocol)	✓	On-chain order book (limit_order_create) since launch, and liquidity pools since the September 2020 hardfork.
Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself)	✗	No protocol-level cross-chain messaging; gateways are third parties.
NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules)	✓	User-Issued Assets can be created with a supply of 1 and precision 0; NFT tools issue them with an nft_object description, though no NFT BSIP exists.
Supply & Demand (8 measures) (Source)	4.4	average of 8 measures
Exchanges (10 or more: 10)	2	2 exchanges
Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10)	1.7	$68,983 traded in 24 hours; #1748 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $69,825)
Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10)	7.9	2.0% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days
Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10)	4.8	$744 within 2% of the price on 2 exchanges, 0.03% of its market cap, median of the last 3 days
Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10)	1.1	$2.7M, 1.1 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold
Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0)	10	no futures, options or margin on the exchanges read
Supply (21 million scores 10)	7	fixed maximum supply of 3.6 billion
Wallet support (wallets that hold it, 10 or more: 10)	1	its own node and wallet, counted as 1: no wallet in the site's directory lists it yet
Record	7.3	group average
Age (years since genesis) (Source)	10	12 full years since 2014-07-21, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated).
Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities)	2	1 positive, 0 negative source
Positive
Steady work, 2 of 6	✓	40 commits in 1 of the last 12 months (github.com/bitshares/bitshares-core); bitshares-core 7.0.4 (2026-10-23) and 7.0.3 (2026-09-10) are Docker-image rebuilds with 'No changes to the consensus or functionality'; the previous code release was 7.0.2 on 2023-12-15.
Conduct (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	✓

Twelve criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards are five of them: sound money (six qualities: scarcity, durability, fungibility, portability, divisibility, verifiability), privacy (five checks), scalability (four measures and three features), security (miner pay, pool diversity, network activity and four checks) and decentralisation (censorship resistance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share); programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) follows them, and supply and demand averages eight measures of the market, the wallets and the supply. 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.

Proof of Stake coins

Proof of Work coins

Supply

2,995,060,000 of a maximum 3,600,570,502 BTS are in circulation — 83.2% of the total that will ever exist.

Launch and allocation

Premine (allocated at launch)	80.5% of today's supply
Sold by the issuer or insiders	33% of today's supply
Developer share received since launch	6.4% of today's supply
Developer share of new coins today	0%
Nodes or validators	17
Fundraising	Public sale

The BitShares 2.0 genesis (October 2015) carried over ~2.412B BTS from BitShares 1.0. BTS 1.0 was split 50% to AngelShares (AGS) donors and 50% to ProtoShares (PTS) holders as a founders' airdrop, with later merges of DNS and Follow My Vote. Against ~2.995B current supply, 2.412/2.995 = about 80.5%.

AngelShares (AGS) donation drive from December 2013 into 2014, in BTC and PTS, to Invictus Innovations, for 50% of the initial BTS. The BTC total was not found.

BitShares 2.0 mints a budget from the reserve (unissued supply up to the 3.6B max) at each hourly maintenance: witness pay to block producers plus pay for holder-voted workers, a treasury-like cut. Core-development and committee-owned workers (including committee dividend and market-operation funds) were paid mainly from 2015 to 2020; since 2021 only refund and threshold workers sit above the line, so real worker pay is about 0 today. Arithmetic: worker budget minus leftover, summed over all 96,683 budget records (2.13.x, Oct 2015 to Oct 2026), is 520.69M BTS; minus 330.22M returned to the reserve by refund/burn workers (total_burned) = 190.47M / 2,996.93M current supply = 6.4%.

soldPct assumes the AGS half was ~1B of a ~2B BTS 1.0 initial supply (about 33% of today's supply), which is not directly confirmed. Worker payments, some to core developers, are holder-voted and are not counted as insider.

Sources: api.bts.mobi · github.com · github.com · coinmarketcap.com · howbitsharesworks.readthedocs.io · docs.bitshares.eu. Researched 2026-10-26, medium confidence.

What a regulator has said

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.

How CoinSpectrum ranks BitShares

BitShares is #196 among cryptocurrencies and #1510 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 1314 places between BitShares'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).