DeFiChain ranks #227 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #1816: 1589 of the 1815 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 2061 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 77% are tokens, 18% are claims on other assets and 5% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | pending — launch under review |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #227 |
| Rank counting claims | #1816 |
| Market capitalisation | $1M |
| Price | $0.00161 |
| Circulating supply | 828,938,980 DFI |
| Maximum supply | 1,300,000,000 DFI |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | PoS |
| Network purpose | Financial ledger |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
Grade pending. DeFiChain's launch — how much went to insiders, whether it was sold to investors — is still being researched. A grade is not given until it is, so that a coin is never rated higher for what is not yet known.
| 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 (Source) | 6.9 | group average, 6 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | — | 2.9 of 3 points, 3 not yet measured |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 8.8 | fixed maximum supply of 1.3 billion: supply scale 7.6, cap 10 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | – | 6 full years since its first recorded price, record not yet reviewed |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | – | |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 8 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $1.6e-11 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✓ | typical fee $3e-9; about 3,782 transactions a second (10 on the throughput scale; 5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Verifiability: open-source nodes and checking without a trusted server | – | pruned nodes validate everything |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 2.5 | 1 of 5 passed, 1 not yet measured source |
| Whitepaper privacy: keys are not tied to an identity | ✓ | Addresses are hashes of keys users generate themselves; the node checks scripts and signatures, with no identity condition in its consensus rules. |
| 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) | ✗ | Bitcoin-derived node relays its own transactions over clearnet by default; Tor (-proxy/-onion) needs user setup and there is no Dandelion. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | Transparent UTXO amounts; no confidential-transaction or shielded feature. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | Transparent addresses; no ring signatures, ZK proofs or stealth addresses. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 8.1 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $3e-9 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 10 | about 3,782 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 5.3 | a block every 30 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 64 MB limit, 1280 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 5 | 1 of 2 passed, 1 not yet researched |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | – | |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | DeFiChain ain v4.2.5 keeps Bitcoin Core's -prune. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | DeFiChain is proof of stake, so Bitcoin-style SPV cannot check the stake behind its headers, and no shipped light client verifies it; light wallets trust a server. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | — | 0 of 3 points, 6 not yet measured |
| 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 | – | |
| Node software is open source | – | |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions 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 | DeFi Standard Tokens: any address can create a token with a 100 DFI collateral (72 user-created tokens on mainnet), plus the MetaChain EVM. |
| Smart contracts: a general-purpose contract system | 2 | MetaChain EVM, activated at block 3,462,000 (November 2023), producing blocks alongside the UTXO chain in October 2026. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | OP_CHECKMULTISIG, OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY and OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY in its Bitcoin-derived script interpreter. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | Script can express HTLCs (hash check plus CLTV/CSV refund). |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✓ | Pool pairs (AMM) in the consensus rules since the Bayfront upgrade (November 2020); 78 of 188 pools active in October 2026. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No protocol-level cross-chain messaging; the transfer domain links its own UTXO and EVM layers. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✓ | ERC-721 contracts on its MetaChain EVM. |
| Decentralisation | 7.2 | section average, 3 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | — | Not yet researched |
| No central team (Source) | — | Not yet researched |
| Who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | — | Not counted: DeFiChain lists 4,325 enabled masternodes (ocean.defichain.com /v0/mainnet/masternodes, 2026-10-26; 11,667 resigned), but each is a 20,000-DFI collateral slot with its own addresses, so the list cannot show how many machines or operators run them, and no node crawler covers the network. |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 3.7 | 63% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. The genesis block paid 588,000,000 DFI (49% of the original 1.2B) to the DeFiChain Foundation (chainparams.cpp asserts the initdist sum). Against current supply net of burns of 933.8M (DeFiChain Ocean API /stats/supply, 2026-10-23) that is 63.0%. source |
| Fundraising | — | Launch not yet researched |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.4 | Developer share: about 5.9% of today's supply received so far; 4.9% of each new block reward goes to them today. Launch (May 2020) to block 356,499: 10% of the 200-DFI block reward to the Foundation; to block 893,999 (DFIP1): 19.9 DFI (9.95%); since Eunos (block 894,000, Jun 2021): 4.91% of the 405.04-DFI reward (cut 1.658% every 32,690 blocks) to the Community Development Fund, masternode-governed since Grand Central (Dec 2022). 7.13M + 10.70M + 37.03M (to height 6,538,713; current emission 1.12 of 22.84 DFI a block) = 54.85M DFI = 5.9% of 933.8M net supply (Ocean). source |
| Supply & Demand | 3.9 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 0.1 | average of 4 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 0 | no exchange the site reads trades it |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 0 | $1 traded in 24 hours; #4289 by volume |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 0 | 0.00% of its market cap a day |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | – | no order book on the nine exchanges read |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 0.3 | $1.3M, 0.3 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | – | not measured |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 7.6 | fixed maximum supply of 1.3 billion |
| Record | 6 | group average, 1 of 3 measured |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | — | Not yet reviewed |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 6 | 6 full years since 2020-07-03, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | — | Not yet measured: no commit count and no release research |
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.
828,938,980 of a maximum 1,300,000,000 DFI are in circulation — 63.8% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 63% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Developer share received since launch | 5.9% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 4.9% |
The genesis block paid 588,000,000 DFI (49% of the original 1.2B) to the DeFiChain Foundation (chainparams.cpp asserts the initdist sum). Against current supply net of burns of 933.8M (DeFiChain Ocean API /stats/supply, 2026-10-23) that is 63.0%.
The whitepaper let the foundation pass part of its 49% to accredited investors and 'external partners' to fund development, but no amounts are published. KuCoin's profile says there was no ICO, IEO or sales round.
Launch (May 2020) to block 356,499: 10% of the 200-DFI block reward to the Foundation; to block 893,999 (DFIP1): 19.9 DFI (9.95%); since Eunos (block 894,000, Jun 2021): 4.91% of the 405.04-DFI reward (cut 1.658% every 32,690 blocks) to the Community Development Fund, masternode-governed since Grand Central (Dec 2022). 7.13M + 10.70M + 37.03M (to height 6,538,713; current emission 1.12 of 22.84 DFI a block) = 54.85M DFI = 5.9% of 933.8M net supply (Ocean).
The 10% foundation share of block rewards before it moved to on-chain governance isn't included, so the true figure is somewhat higher. It's unknown whether any of the 158.9M sent to burn addresses came from the foundation's genesis coins. Supply bases differ: CMC 829M circulating, CoinGecko 922M, Ocean 933.8M.
Sources: github.com · ocean.defichain.com · ocean.defichain.com · kucoin.com. Researched 2026-10-24, high 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.
DeFiChain is #227 among cryptocurrencies and #1816 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 1589 places between DeFiChain'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).