Ethereum ranks #2 of 508 cryptocurrencies — assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus mechanism.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 75/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #2 |
| Rank counting claims | #2 |
| Market capitalisation | $289.2B |
| Price | $2,367 |
| Circulating supply | 122,170,166 ETH |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Gasper (Casper-FFG + LMD-GHOST) |
| 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.
A — 75 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 78 (B to A).
| 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 | 6.8 | group average, 4 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 5 | 5 of 10 passed source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✓ | Gasper (Casper-FFG + LMD-GHOST) |
| Limited supply | ✗ | no fixed maximum |
| No pre-issuance or developer mint | ✗ | |
| No developer tax | ✓ | |
| No authority that can halt the chain or freeze funds | ✓ | No protocol-level key or party can freeze or claw back ETH; issuer blacklists exist only inside individual token contracts. |
| No central team | ✓ | Several independent client teams (Geth/Ethereum Foundation, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth/Paradigm) and an open EIP process; no single organisation approves protocol changes. |
| Fees under one cent | ✓ | typical fee $0.004 |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | Blocks every 12 s, but economic finality (two Casper-FFG epochs) takes about 13 minutes. |
| UTXO ledger | ✗ | |
| Privacy built into the protocol | ✗ | |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space) | 7.5 | average of 4 measures source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 8 | typical fee $0.004 |
| Throughput (1,000 transactions a second or more 10) | 7.9 | about 238 simple transactions a second |
| 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) | 10 | 1.5 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 75 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% | ✓ | 21.2% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 43.6% |
| More than one maintained client | ✓ | 5 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Several independent client teams (Geth/Ethereum Foundation, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth/Paradigm) and an open EIP process; no single organisation approves protocol changes. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 1,815,335 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) | 3.3 | 2 of 6 passed source |
| Decentralisation | ||
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | Geth and the consensus clients gossip transactions directly over devp2p/libp2p; no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Altair (Oct 2021): sync committees of 512 validators sign headers so light clients verify without trusting a server. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Partial history expiry (Jul 2025): every execution client can run without pre-Merge blocks (geth --history.chain postmerge), on top of state pruning. |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✗ | No live payment-channel network on mainnet; rollups are layer 2s and do not count. |
| Security | ||
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | No shielded pool or confidential transactions in the protocol; privacy contracts are applications. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | No protocol-level sender or receiver hiding. |
| Issuance | 6.1 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 4.1 | 58.9% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Genesis allocation of 72,009,990.5 ETH (about 60M sold in the 2014 crowdsale plus about 12M to early contributors and the Ethereum Foundation) against a current total supply of 122,155,370 ETH (Etherscan supply page, 2026-10-23). source |
| Fundraising | 4.1 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 58.9% of supply was theirs to sell, 49.2% sold so far. 60,102,216 ETH sold in the July-September 2014 public ether sale for about 31,500 BTC; the ~12M ETH to early contributors and the Foundation were not sold. 60,102,216 / 122,155,370 ETH current supply (Etherscan, 2026-10-23) = 49.2%. 42-day public ether sale, July to September 2014, open to anyone paying in BTC (2000 ETH/BTC falling to 1337 ETH/BTC). Raised about 31,500 BTC (about $18M at the time). Two extra pools, each 0.099x the ether sold, went to early contributors and the Foundation endowment. No private or venture round in ETH. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No cut. Proof-of-work block rewards (2015-2022) went entirely to miners, and proof-of-stake issuance since the September 2022 Merge goes entirely to validators. The EIP-1559 base-fee burn is a burn, not a cut. source |
| Supply & Demand | 8.1 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 7.8 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 46 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 9.85 | $2,508,192,998 traded in 24 hours; #4 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 30, $3,194,857,990) |
| 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) | 5.7 | $150,972,393 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.05% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 3 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 10 | $289B, at the top of the scale |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 5 | perpetual open interest 7.2% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 8.4 | no fixed maximum; 122 million in circulation |
| Record | 10 | 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. Genesis block mined 30 July 2015. |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 10 | 5 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 1,298 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum); go-ethereum v1.17.10, 23 Oct 2026; 35 releases in the last 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Geth 1.14.13, Jan 2025: fixed CVE-2025-24883 (p2p DoS); Geth 1.16.8/1.16.9, early 2026: fixed CVE-2026-22862, CVE-2026-26314 and CVE-2026-26315. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Pectra, 7 May 2025: blob target doubled (EIP-7691); Fusaka, 3 Dec 2025: PeerDAS and blob-parameter forks; gas limit raised 36M to 45M to 60M during 2025. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Pectra, 7 May 2025: EIP-7702 lets externally owned accounts set contract code (account abstraction). |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes, +2 | ✓ | ERC-20 (and ERC-721/1155) contracts on its EVM, open to any account since launch in 2015. |
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.
122,170,166 ETH are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 58.9% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 49.2% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
Genesis allocation of 72,009,990.5 ETH (about 60M sold in the 2014 crowdsale plus about 12M to early contributors and the Ethereum Foundation) against a current total supply of 122,155,370 ETH (Etherscan supply page, 2026-10-23).
42-day public ether sale, July to September 2014, open to anyone paying in BTC (2000 ETH/BTC falling to 1337 ETH/BTC). Raised about 31,500 BTC (about $18M at the time). Two extra pools, each 0.099x the ether sold, went to early contributors and the Foundation endowment. No private or venture round in ETH.
60,102,216 ETH sold in the July-September 2014 public ether sale for about 31,500 BTC; the ~12M ETH to early contributors and the Foundation were not sold. 60,102,216 / 122,155,370 ETH current supply (Etherscan, 2026-10-23) = 49.2%.
No cut. Proof-of-work block rewards (2015-2022) went entirely to miners, and proof-of-stake issuance since the September 2022 Merge goes entirely to validators. The EIP-1559 base-fee burn is a burn, not a cut.
Sources: blog.ethereum.org · etherscan.io · ethereum.org · eips.ethereum.org · ultrasound.money. 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: ~60% of supply was pre-issued in the 2014 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.
Ethereum is #2 among cryptocurrencies and #2 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. Nothing above Ethereum is a claim or a token, so its two ranks agree. 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 46 wrapped and staked claims on Ethereum →