Ethereum Classic ranks #25 of 508 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #69: 44 of the 68 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 56 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 59% are claims on other assets, 34% are tokens and 7% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 74/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #25 |
| Rank counting claims | #69 |
| Market capitalisation | $1.2B |
| Price | $7.66 |
| Circulating supply | 158,843,115 ETC |
| Maximum supply | 210,700,000 ETC |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | Etchash |
| Own hashrate | 196 TH/s |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
A — 74 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 66 to 77 (B 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 | 6.8 | group average, 4 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 5 | 5 of 10 passed source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✓ | Etchash |
| Limited supply | ✓ | fixed maximum of 210,700,000 |
| 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 | ✗ | Core-geth, the only maintained ETC client after Besu dropped ETC, is maintained by a small group of developers funded by the ETC Cooperative. |
| Fees under one cent | ✓ | typical fee $0.00035 |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | About 14.6-second probabilistic PoW blocks; safe acceptance needs many confirmations. |
| UTXO ledger | ✗ | |
| Privacy built into the protocol | ✗ | |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space) | 7.1 | 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) | 4.9 | about 30 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 4 | a block every 12.6 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 9.5 | 0.5 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 23.8 MB per 10 minutes |
| Security (9 checks) | 5 | 5 of 9 passed source |
| Miners paid over $1 million a day | ✗ | about $80,908 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% | ✓ | 41.4% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✗ | 81.8% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Core-geth, the only maintained ETC client after Besu dropped ETC, is maintained by a small group of developers funded by the ETC Cooperative. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 10,083 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) | — | 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) | ✗ | core-geth relays transactions directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | No sync-committee or finality-proof light client; PoW header chains without a maintained light protocol. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✗ | core-geth --gcmode full prunes old state tries but keeps every block; no block-history expiry. |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✗ | No payment channels. |
| Security | ||
| 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. |
| Issuance | 6.9 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 5.4 | 45.7% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. ETC inherits Ethereum's genesis allocation of 72,009,990.5 coins (about 60M from the 2014 public sale plus about 12M to the developer fund and the Ethereum Foundation), against a circulating/total supply of about 157.7M ETC (CoinGlass and Coinranking, 2026). source |
| Fundraising | 5.4 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 45.7% of supply was theirs to sell, 38% sold so far. Inherited from Ethereum's 2014 crowdsale on the predecessor chain (balances copied 1:1 at the 2016 fork): 60,102,216 ETH sold; ETC itself made no sale. 60.10M / ~158.0M ETC circulating = total (KuCoin/Finary, Aug-Sep 2026) = 38.0%. Ethereum's 2014 public crowdsale (42 days, open to anyone) raised 31,591 BTC (about $18.4M). There were no private or VC rounds. ETC adds no sale of its own. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. The whole block reward (ECIP-1017 '5M20' schedule, now 2.048 ETC) goes to miners; there has never been a dev fee. A protocol treasury (ECIP-1098) was proposed and not adopted, and the ETC Cooperative is donation-funded. source |
| Supply & Demand | 7.4 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 6.8 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 47 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 4.2 | $10,855,692 traded in 24 hours; #117 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 30, $13,108,278) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 6.4 | 1.0% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.7 | $2,479,793 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.20% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 7.7 | $1.2B, 7.7 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 5 | perpetual open interest 5.9% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 7.9 | fixed maximum supply of 211 million |
| 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) | 10 | 11 full years since genesis. Ethereum's original chain, which kept its ledger when the DAO-recovery fork split off at block 1,920,000 on 20 July 2016: its history runs from the genesis block of 30 July 2015. |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 9 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 28 commits in 3 of the last 12 months (github.com/etclabscore/core-geth); core-geth v1.12.23 'Argos', released 2026-08-14 (also v1.12.21 and v1.12.22 in March 2026; no release between June 2024 and March 2026). |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Core-geth v1.12.21, 18 Mar 2026: emergency patch for an active attack on bootnodes; v1.12.22, 28 Mar 2026: CVE-2025-24883, CVE-2026-26315, CVE-2026-26313. |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes, +2 | ✓ | ERC-20 contracts on its EVM, open to any account since the 2016 chain split. |
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.
158,843,115 of a maximum 210,700,000 ETC are in circulation — 75.4% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 45.7% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 38% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
ETC inherits Ethereum's genesis allocation of 72,009,990.5 coins (about 60M from the 2014 public sale plus about 12M to the developer fund and the Ethereum Foundation), against a circulating/total supply of about 157.7M ETC (CoinGlass and Coinranking, 2026).
Ethereum's 2014 public crowdsale (42 days, open to anyone) raised 31,591 BTC (about $18.4M). There were no private or VC rounds. ETC adds no sale of its own.
Inherited from Ethereum's 2014 crowdsale on the predecessor chain (balances copied 1:1 at the 2016 fork): 60,102,216 ETH sold; ETC itself made no sale. 60.10M / ~158.0M ETC circulating = total (KuCoin/Finary, Aug-Sep 2026) = 38.0%.
The whole block reward (ECIP-1017 '5M20' schedule, now 2.048 ETC) goes to miners; there has never been a dev fee. A protocol treasury (ECIP-1098) was proposed and not adopted, and the ETC Cooperative is donation-funded.
Sources: blog.ethereum.org · kucoin.com · coinranking.com · github.com · github.com · coinranking.com. Researched 2026-10-24, high confidence.
Ethereum Classic is secured by 196 TH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.
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.
Ethereum Classic is #25 among cryptocurrencies and #69 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 44 places between Ethereum Classic'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).