Bittensor ranks #21 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #36: 15 of the 35 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 23 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 78% are claims on other assets and 22% are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | C · 62/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #21 |
| Rank counting claims | #36 |
| Market capitalisation | $2.9B |
| Price | $252.07 |
| Circulating supply | 11,667,233 TAO |
| Maximum supply | 21,000,000 TAO |
| Consensus family | Proof of Authority |
| Consensus mechanism | Proof of Authority (Subtensor, Opentensor Foundation validators); Yuma Consensus for rewards |
| Network purpose | AI |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | No premine |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
C — 62 out of 100, provisional (from 17 of 20 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 52 to 70 (C to B).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 7.3 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 7.3 | Proof of authority: 7.3 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 7.3 | Proof of authority: 7.3 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 5.4 | group average, 10 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 5 | 2.5 of 5 points, 1 not yet measured source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 5 | fixed maximum supply of 21 million, but an issuer or vote can mint outside the schedule: supply scale 10, cap 0 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✗ | 3 full years since its first recorded price, one halt, freeze or reversal in five years |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | ✗ | an authority can freeze funds: The Opentensor Foundation holds the chain's sudo key and put the chain into safe mode, halting ordinary transactions, after the July 2024 wallet exploit. |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 9 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $2.5e-7 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | – | |
| 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 sr25519/ed25519 key can hold and send TAO; the Substrate balances pallet carries 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) | ✗ | Substrate gossip relays extrinsics directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| 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) | — | too few measures yet source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | – | not yet measured |
| 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) | 3.9 | a block every 12 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 | ✗ | 12-second Aura blocks with GRANDPA finality after further blocks; nothing protects zero-confirmation payments. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Subtensor lite nodes run Substrate state and block pruning; only archive nodes keep full history. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Substrate GRANDPA finality proofs let a light client (smoldot) verify headers without trusting a server. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 3.9 | 3 of 7 points, 2 not yet measured 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% | – | |
| Largest three under 75% | – | |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Subtensor, the only node, is developed in the Opentensor Foundation's repository and the Foundation sets the roadmap. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 77,878 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 | ERC-20 contracts on the EVM built into Subtensor (chain ID 964); deployment started whitelisted in late 2024 and was opened to all around 29 December 2024, the current guide treating mainnet deployment as identical to testnet. |
| Smart contracts: a general-purpose contract system | 2 | An EVM built into Subtensor (chain ID 964), with mainnet deployment working as on testnet since late December 2024. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | pallet_multisig in the Subtensor runtime plus timelock contracts on its EVM. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | The Subtensor EVM can run HTLC contracts (hash lock plus timelock refund). |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✓ | Dynamic TAO (February 2025): each subnet has a protocol AMM pool of TAO and its alpha token, initialised by the protocol at subnet launch (now Balancer-style weighted pools). |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | Subtensor is a standalone Substrate chain, not a parachain, with no IBC or validator-verified messaging. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✓ | ERC-721 contracts on the Subtensor EVM. |
| Decentralisation | 5.6 | section average, 6 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 0 | An authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: The Opentensor Foundation holds the chain's sudo key and put the chain into safe mode, halting ordinary transactions, after the July 2024 wallet exploit. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: Subtensor, the only node, is developed in the Opentensor Foundation's repository and the Foundation sets the roadmap. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 4.3 | Proof of authority: 4.3 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | — | Not yet counted |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 10 | 0% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Bittensor launched in 2021 with no pre-mined tokens and no ICO; every TAO has been emitted at 1 TAO per block (0.5 since the Dec 2025 halving) to miners, validators and, later, subnet participants. Supply about 11.34M of 21M max (CoinGecko). source |
| Fundraising | 10 | No sale of the coin source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.4 | Developer share: about 5.7% of today's supply received so far; 18% of each new block reward goes to them today. Subnet owners, who register and run a subnet but neither produce blocks nor do the subnet's mining or validation, get 18% of each subnet's emission (miners 41%, validators and stakers 41%, of which 6% to root stakers). Since dTAO (13 Feb 2025) the owner cut is paid in subnet alpha while TAO emission goes into subnet pools, so only the pre-dTAO period is counted: from subnet registration (Revolution upgrade, Oct 2023) owners got 18% of TAO emission directly, ~500 days × 7,200 TAO × 18% ≈ 648k TAO ≈ 5.7% of 11.34M. The Opentensor Foundation takes no cut. Whether subnet owners count as 'developers' is a classification call; if not, both figures are 0. source |
| Supply & Demand | 9.2 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.4 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 34 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 8.1 | $61,259,300 traded in 24 hours; #27 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $111,490,323) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.1 | 3.4% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.9 | $7,025,252 within 2% of the price on 8 exchanges, 0.24% 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) | 8.7 | $2.9B, 8.7 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 6.7 | futures, options and margin positions 11% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 10 | fixed maximum supply of 21 million |
| Record | 6.3 | 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, 2024-07-02 | ✗ | Opentensor Foundation put the chain into 'safe mode' (validators firewalled, transactions halted) at 19:41 UTC after an ~$8M wallet-draining attack via a malicious PyPI package; transactions stayed blocked for several days. |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 3 | 3 full years since 2023-03-06, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 7 | 2 positive, 0 negative, 2 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 4,866 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/opentensor/subtensor); Subtensor runtime v484, released 2026-10-23; runtime releases several times a month. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Dynamic TAO, 13 Feb 2025: per-subnet alpha tokens with on-chain AMM pools. |
| Not yet researched | ||
| Shipped a security fix in two years | – | |
| 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.
11,667,233 of a maximum 21,000,000 TAO are in circulation — 55.6% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Developer share received since launch | 5.7% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 18% |
| Fundraising | No sale and no investor round |
Bittensor launched in 2021 with no pre-mined tokens and no ICO; every TAO has been emitted at 1 TAO per block (0.5 since the Dec 2025 halving) to miners, validators and, later, subnet participants. Supply about 11.34M of 21M max (CoinGecko).
Official blog: 'a fair launch — no pre-mined tokens or ICOs'. Third-party profiles say DCG and Polychain built large positions through secondary-market purchases or mining/validating; no primary sale by the Opentensor Foundation is documented.
Subnet owners, who register and run a subnet but neither produce blocks nor do the subnet's mining or validation, get 18% of each subnet's emission (miners 41%, validators and stakers 41%, of which 6% to root stakers). Since dTAO (13 Feb 2025) the owner cut is paid in subnet alpha while TAO emission goes into subnet pools, so only the pre-dTAO period is counted: from subnet registration (Revolution upgrade, Oct 2023) owners got 18% of TAO emission directly, ~500 days × 7,200 TAO × 18% ≈ 648k TAO ≈ 5.7% of 11.34M. The Opentensor Foundation takes no cut. Whether subnet owners count as 'developers' is a classification call; if not, both figures are 0.
Sources: bittensor.com · bittensor.com · github.com · blog.bittensor.com · bittensor.com · docs.learnbittensor.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.
Bittensor is #21 among cryptocurrencies and #36 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 15 places between Bittensor'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 4 wrapped and staked claims on Bittensor →