Cardano ranks #11 of 508 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #18: 7 of the 17 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 12 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 9 are claims on other assets and 3 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | C · 63/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #11 |
| Rank counting claims | #18 |
| Market capitalisation | $7.8B |
| Price | $0.2077 |
| Circulating supply | 37,571,497,273 ADA |
| Maximum supply | 45,000,000,000 ADA |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Ouroboros |
| 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.
C — 63 out of 100, provisional (from 15 of 17 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 56 to 68 (C 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 | 5.9 | group average, 4 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 4 | 4 of 10 passed source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✓ | Ouroboros |
| Limited supply | ✓ | fixed maximum of 45,000,000,000 |
| No pre-issuance or developer mint | ✗ | |
| No developer tax | ✗ | |
| No authority that can halt the chain or freeze funds | ✓ | No protocol party can freeze or claw back ADA; no deliberate halts. |
| No central team | ✗ | Input Output (IOG) employs most developers of the reference Haskell cardano-node, now hosted under Intersect MBO; Blink Labs (Dingo) and Pragma (Amaru) build alternative nodes. |
| Fees under one cent | ✗ | typical fee $0.035 |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | Ouroboros Praos gives probabilistic settlement over many 20 s slots-with-blocks; there is no fast finality or protected zero-confirmation. |
| UTXO ledger | ✓ | |
| Privacy built into the protocol | ✗ | |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space) | 4.8 | average of 4 measures source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 4.9 | typical fee $0.035 |
| Throughput (1,000 transactions a second or more 10) | 3.8 | about 13.5 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 4.7 | a block every 20 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 5.7 | 0.0901 MB limit, 2.7 MB per 10 minutes |
| Security (9 checks) | 6 | 6 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% | ✓ | 0.59% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 1.54% |
| More than one maintained client | ✓ | 3 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Input Output (IOG) employs most developers of the reference Haskell cardano-node, now hosted under Intersect MBO; Blink Labs (Dingo) and Pragma (Amaru) build alternative nodes. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 91,090 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) | — | Not yet counted |
| 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) | ✗ | cardano-node diffuses transactions directly; no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | Mithril stake-based certificates run as a separate signer/aggregator network beside the node, not in the consensus protocol. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✗ | cardano-node keeps the full immutable chain; Mithril snapshots speed bootstrap but still carry full history. |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✗ | Hydra heads are a layer 2; no native payment channels. |
| Security | ||
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | No confidential transactions on mainnet (Midnight is a separate chain). |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Issuance | 4.5 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2 | 80.4% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Genesis distribution of 31,112,484,646 ADA (25,927,070,538 ADA from the voucher sale plus 5,185,414,108 ADA to IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation), against a total supply of 38,682,462,315 ADA (cardano.org supply overview, epoch 636, 2026). source |
| Fundraising | 2 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 80.4% of supply was theirs to sell, 67% sold so far. The 2015-2017 Ada voucher sale delivered 25,927,070,538 ADA at genesis; the 5.19B to IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation was not sold. 25,927.1M / 38,682.5M total supply (cardano.org supply overview, epoch 636, 2026) = 67.0%. Ada voucher sale (2015-2017) run by a Japanese corporation and its sales force, open to buyers in Japan (about 94.45% of BTC received), South Korea, China, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Gross sales were 108,844.5 BTC (commonly cited as about $62M). No venture or private token round is recorded. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.4 | Developer share: about 6.2% of today's supply received so far; 38% of each new block reward goes to them today. Since Shelley (Jul/Aug 2020) the protocol sends tau = 20% of each epoch's reward pot (monetary expansion of 0.3% of reserves plus fees) to the treasury, which DReps and the Constitutional Committee spend. Undistributed staking rewards go back to the reserves, so the treasury takes about 37-38% of the ADA actually issued (epochs 652-663: ~3.7M of ~9.7M ADA an epoch, Koios totals). Cumulatively: summing per-epoch treasury increases from epoch 209 to 663 gives 2.35B ADA, plus ~0.06B estimated inflow in the 25 withdrawal epochs, ≈ 2.41B against 38.95B supply (45B minus reserves, epoch 663) = 6.2%. source |
| Supply & Demand | 5.6 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.3 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 47 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 9.05 | $57,758,298 traded in 24 hours; #20 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 30, $139,141,897) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 7.2 | 1.5% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.6 | $14,908,243 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.19% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9.7 | $7.8B, 9.7 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 6 | perpetual open interest 4.4% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 2.9 | fixed maximum supply of 45 billion |
| Record | 9.7 | group average |
| Record (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 | ✓ | |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 9 | 9 full years since 2017-10-01, 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 source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 2,001 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-node); IntersectMBO/cardano-node 11.1.3, 2026-09-29; 19 stable releases in 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | cardano-node 10.5.2/10.5.3, 21 Nov 2025: fixed the delegation-certificate deserialization bug that partitioned mainnet. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Plomin hard fork, 29 Jan 2025: full on-chain governance and new Plutus V3 built-ins. |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes, +2 | ✓ | Native assets in the ledger rules since the Mary hard fork of March 2021, mintable by anyone under a minting policy. |
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.
37,571,497,273 of a maximum 45,000,000,000 ADA are in circulation — 83.5% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 80.4% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 67% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 6.2% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 38% |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
Genesis distribution of 31,112,484,646 ADA (25,927,070,538 ADA from the voucher sale plus 5,185,414,108 ADA to IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation), against a total supply of 38,682,462,315 ADA (cardano.org supply overview, epoch 636, 2026).
Ada voucher sale (2015-2017) run by a Japanese corporation and its sales force, open to buyers in Japan (about 94.45% of BTC received), South Korea, China, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Gross sales were 108,844.5 BTC (commonly cited as about $62M). No venture or private token round is recorded.
The 2015-2017 Ada voucher sale delivered 25,927,070,538 ADA at genesis; the 5.19B to IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation was not sold. 25,927.1M / 38,682.5M total supply (cardano.org supply overview, epoch 636, 2026) = 67.0%.
Since Shelley (Jul/Aug 2020) the protocol sends tau = 20% of each epoch's reward pot (monetary expansion of 0.3% of reserves plus fees) to the treasury, which DReps and the Constitutional Committee spend. Undistributed staking rewards go back to the reserves, so the treasury takes about 37-38% of the ADA actually issued (epochs 652-663: ~3.7M of ~9.7M ADA an epoch, Koios totals). Cumulatively: summing per-epoch treasury increases from epoch 209 to 663 gives 2.35B ADA, plus ~0.06B estimated inflow in the 25 withdrawal epochs, ≈ 2.41B against 38.95B supply (45B minus reserves, epoch 663) = 6.2%.
Sources: cardano.org · cardano.org · api.koios.rest · docs.cardano.org · cardano.org · cexplorer.io. Researched 2026-10-24, high confidence.
Officially a digital commodity (SEC-CFTC, Mar 2026) AND contested — its securities status was alleged or widely disputed. Both classifications apply. Context: pre-issued at genesis via the 2017 ICO (no mining).
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Cardano is #11 among cryptocurrencies and #18 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 7 places between Cardano'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 1 wrapped and staked claim on Cardano →