Dash ranks #33 of 508 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #88: 55 of the 87 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 76 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 58% are claims on other assets, 37% are tokens and 5% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A+ · 85/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #33 |
| Rank counting claims | #88 |
| Market capitalisation | $695M |
| Price | $53.96 |
| Circulating supply | 12,879,297 DASH |
| Maximum supply | 18,920,000 DASH |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | X11 |
| Own hashrate | 2.63 PH/s |
| Network purpose | Payments |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Premine |
| Regulatory class | Contested |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
A+ — 85 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 80 to 87 (A to A+).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 10 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards | 8 | group average, 5 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 6 | 6 of 10 passed source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✓ | X11 |
| Limited supply | ✓ | fixed maximum of 18,920,000 |
| 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 coins or halt the chain. |
| No central team | ✗ | Dash Core is developed by Dash Core Group, funded by the treasury, in the dashpay repository. |
| Fees under one cent | ✓ | typical fee $0.00035 |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | Every transaction receives an InstantSend lock from a masternode quorum within about two seconds, protecting it against double-spends. |
| UTXO ledger | ✓ | |
| Privacy built into the protocol | ✗ | |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space) | 7.8 | average of 4 measures source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.00035 |
| Throughput (1,000 transactions a second or more 10) | 5.8 | about 56 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 7.9 | a block every 2.6 minutes |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 7.5 | 2 MB limit, 7.62 MB per 10 minutes |
| Security (9 checks) | 6 | 6 of 9 passed source |
| Miners paid over $1 million a day | ✗ | about $12,203 a day |
| Miners paid over $100,000 a day | ✗ | |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✓ | |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 34.8% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 71.4% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Dash Core is developed by Dash Core Group, funded by the treasury, in the dashpay repository. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 9,559 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Decentralisation: who can mint (Source) | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Decentralisation: nodes (Source) | 10 | 2,578 reachable nodes (distinct IP addresses at the chain's tip, crawled by CoinSpectrum on 2026-10-27; clearnet only) |
| Decentralisation: holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Capabilities (protocol features) | 5 | 3 of 6 passed source |
| Decentralisation | ||
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | Dash Core relays transactions directly; Tor is optional configuration. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Bitcoin-style SPV with headers and Merkle proofs, plus DIP-0004 simplified masternode lists for verifying InstantSend and ChainLocks. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Dash Core -prune deletes old blocks (not usable on masternodes). |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✓ | InstantSend: masternode quorums lock transaction inputs for instant confirmation enforced by the protocol. |
| Security | ||
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | CoinJoin mixes coins of equal denominations but amounts stay public. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | CoinJoin is optional mixing without ring signatures, ZK proofs or stealth addresses. |
| Issuance | 9.3 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 8.5 | 15% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. About 1.9 million DASH mined in the first two days of a launch with a broken difficulty adjustment (the "instamine"), about 15% of current supply. source |
| Fundraising | 10 | No sale of the coin source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.4 | Developer share: about 5.8% of today's supply received so far; 20% of each new block reward goes to them today. A treasury (governance budget) funded from the block subsidy: 10% from the budget start at block 328,008 (Aug-Sep 2015), doubled to 20% when Core v20 activated (block 1,987,776, 14 Dec 2023); miners now get 20% and masternodes 60%. Only budget allocated to masternode-approved proposals is minted. Arithmetic: superblocks at blocks 631,408-2,558,864 paid 682,589 DASH (coinbase total minus normal reward, 117 superblocks via the Insight API, ~95% of the maximum budget); the 2015-2017 v12.0 budget period adds at most 133,848 DASH (10% of subsidy for blocks 328,008-631,407); midpoint ~750K / 12.88M supply = ~5.8% (range 5.3-6.4%). source |
| Supply & Demand | 8.9 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 7.7 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 33 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 7.15 | $54,548,903 traded in 24 hours; #58 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 30, $43,730,436) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.3 | 6.7% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 8.6 | $2,699,524 within 2% of the price on 7 exchanges, 0.39% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 7.1 | $695M, 7.1 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 4 | perpetual open interest 8.5% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 10 | fixed maximum supply of 18.9 million |
| Record | 8.7 | 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, 2023-05-22 | ✗ | Chain stalled at block 1,874,879 during Dash Core v19 hard-fork activation; v19.1.0 hotfix released about 13 hours later to restore block production. |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 10 | 12 full years since 2014-02-07, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 7 | 3 positive, 1 negative, 1 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 2,608 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/dashpay/dash); Dash Core 23.1.8, released 2026-08-03; v24.0.0-rc.4 on 2026-10-19. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Dash Core v22.0.0, 12 Dec 2024: 'withdrawals' hard fork for Platform credit withdrawals to Core (activated via the enhanced hard-fork process in 2025). |
| Token issuance through a second layer, +1 | ✓ | Tokens run on Dash Platform, a separate chain run by Evonodes, not on Dash Core. |
| Negative | ||
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-09-18, −1 | ✗ | CVE-2019-25220: a long low-difficulty header chain can exhaust memory because the node has no headers pre-synchronisation; still in Dash v23.1.8. |
| 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.
12,879,297 of a maximum 18,920,000 DASH are in circulation — 68.1% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 15% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Developer share received since launch | 5.8% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 20% |
| Fundraising | No sale and no investor round |
About 1.9 million DASH mined in the first two days of a launch with a broken difficulty adjustment (the "instamine"), about 15% of current supply.
No coin sale and no investor round.
A treasury (governance budget) funded from the block subsidy: 10% from the budget start at block 328,008 (Aug-Sep 2015), doubled to 20% when Core v20 activated (block 1,987,776, 14 Dec 2023); miners now get 20% and masternodes 60%. Only budget allocated to masternode-approved proposals is minted. Arithmetic: superblocks at blocks 631,408-2,558,864 paid 682,589 DASH (coinbase total minus normal reward, 117 superblocks via the Insight API, ~95% of the maximum budget); the 2015-2017 v12.0 budget period adds at most 133,848 DASH (10% of subsidy for blocks 328,008-631,407); midpoint ~750K / 12.88M supply = ~5.8% (range 5.3-6.4%).
Sources: docs.dash.org · insight.dash.org · forklog.com · cointelegraph.com · dashpay.atlassian.net · coingecko.com. Researched 2026-10-24, high confidence.
Dash is secured by 2.63 PH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.
Alleged an unregistered security by the SEC (2023 complaint); not named a commodity in 2026 and not adjudicated — status unsettled. Context: fair PoW launch — ~10–15% instamined in the first ~2 days via a difficulty bug, not a premine.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Dash is #33 among cryptocurrencies and #88 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 55 places between Dash'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).