Flow ranks #86 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #510: 424 of the 509 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 514 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 59% are tokens, 33% are claims on other assets and 8% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | C · 57/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #86 |
| Rank counting claims | #510 |
| Market capitalisation | $44M |
| Price | $0.0261 |
| Circulating supply | 1,698,050,266 FLOW |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Flow / HotStuff variant |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
| Regulatory class | Contested |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
C — 57 out of 100, provisional (from 19 of 20 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 53 to 61 (C to C).
| 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) | 4.5 | group average, 12 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 3.5 | 1.4 of 4 points, 2 not yet measured source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 3.8 | no fixed maximum; 1.7 billion in circulation: supply scale 7.5, cap 0 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✗ | 5 full years since its first recorded price, one halt, freeze or reversal in five years |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | ✗ | an authority can freeze funds: In December 2025 validators halted the chain after an exploit, restricted attacker accounts and destroyed 87.4B counterfeit FLOW. |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 8 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $2.6e-10 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | – | typical fee $0.000023 |
| Verifiability: open-source nodes and checking without a trusted server | – | node software open source |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 2 | 1 of 5 passed source |
| Whitepaper privacy: keys are not tied to an identity | ✓ | Accounts are created by an existing account paying the storage fee; the Flow protocol carries no identity check. |
| 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) | ✗ | flow-go relays transactions through access and collection nodes with no Dandelion-style relay or built-in Tor. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | Cadence and Flow EVM balances and transfers are public; no shielded or confidential transfer feature. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | Account addresses are public; no ring signatures, zero-knowledge sender proofs or stealth addresses. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 5.1 | average of 3 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.000023 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | – | not yet measured |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0.4 | a block every 1.3 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | – | not yet measured |
| Features (3 checks) | 5 | 1 of 2 passed, 1 not yet researched |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | HotStuff-based consensus finalises blocks deterministically within a few seconds (0.8 s blocks); execution sealing follows later. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | – | No documented pruning mode for Flow node roles was found. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | Flow observer nodes verify consensus-signed block headers but delegate account and transaction queries to an upstream access node, so payments are not proven to the client. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 3.9 | 3 of 7 points, 2 not yet measured source |
| 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 | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | The Flow Foundation (with Dapper Labs, which created Flow) develops flow-go (Apache-2.0), the only node implementation. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 70,740 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 7.8 | 7 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes | 2 | Cadence smart contracts implementing the Fungible Token standard, deployable by any account, plus Flow EVM (since September 2024) for ERC-20 contracts. |
| Smart contracts: a general-purpose contract system | 2 | Cadence smart contracts deployable by any account since the 2020 mainnet, plus Flow EVM since September 2024. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | Native weighted multi-key accounts (keys summing to the 1000 weight threshold, e.g. 2-of-3 at 500 each); time locks are expressible in Cadence or EVM contracts that read block time. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | Hash- and time-locked contracts can be written in Cadence or Solidity on Flow EVM. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | No exchange in the protocol; DEXes on Flow are user-deployed contracts. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No protocol-level messaging to other chains; the Cadence-EVM bridge connects two environments of the same chain, and bridges to other chains are third-party. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✓ | The NonFungibleToken Cadence standard (and ERC-721 on Flow EVM) run by Flow nodes. |
| Decentralisation | 4.6 | section average, 7 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 0 | An authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: In December 2025 validators halted the chain after an exploit, restricted attacker accounts and destroyed 87.4B counterfeit FLOW. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: The Flow Foundation (with Dapper Labs, which created Flow) develops flow-go (Apache-2.0), the only node implementation. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 8.3 | 301 reachable nodes source |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2.6 | 73.6% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 1.25B FLOW created at genesis (Oct 2020): ecosystem fund 32%, pre-launch backers + community sale 30%, Dapper Labs 20%, development team 18%, against current total supply 1,698,050,266 FLOW (FlowToken.totalSupply via Flow access API, 2026-10-23). source |
| Fundraising | 2.6 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 73.6% of supply was theirs to sell, 22.1% sold so far. Flow's supply page lists 374,800,000 FLOW for pre-launch backers plus the CoinList community sale (Sep-Oct 2020), fully unlocked by October 2022. 374.8M / 1,698.05M total supply (FlowToken.totalSupply, 2026-10-23) = 22.1%. 30% (374.8M FLOW) went to pre-launch backers and a community sale combined; Dapper Labs raised venture funding; exact amounts per round not established here. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. About 5% of supply a year is minted and paid weekly to staked node operators and their delegators (operators keep an 8% delegation fee); no treasury or foundation share of issuance is documented. source |
| Supply & Demand | 7.2 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 6.9 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 33 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 4.2 | $459,652 traded in 24 hours; #595 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $1,192,905) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 8 | 2.1% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 8.7 | $185,698 within 2% of the price on 8 exchanges, 0.42% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 4.1 | $44M, 4.1 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 6.5 | futures, options and margin positions 12% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 7.5 | no fixed maximum; 1.7 billion in circulation |
| Record | 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, 2025-12-27 | ✗ | After an execution-layer exploit duplicated ~$3.9M of tokens, validators executed a coordinated halt within six hours; a proposed rollback was dropped after partner objections, the chain resumed on 29 Dec and 87.4B counterfeit FLOW were destroyed. |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 5 | 5 full years since 2021-01-27, 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 source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 3,947 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/onflow/flow-go); flow-go v0.51.0, 18 Aug 2026; 35 stable releases in the last 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Mainnet 28 / Cadence v1.8.9, Dec 2025–Jan 2026: patched the Cadence type-confusion flaw exploited on 27 Dec 2025 to counterfeit tokens (post-mortem published by Flow). |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Forte network upgrade, 22 Oct 2025: native scheduled transactions (on-chain automation) and Flow Actions composable primitives, Cadence 1.7. |
| Negative | ||
| Exploit of the chain, 2025-12-27, −1 | ✗ | An attacker chained a Cadence runtime type-confusion flaw (v1.8.8) to duplicate about 88 billion units of FLOW and other tokens and bridge out about $3.9M; validators halted the chain about six hours later and the flaw was patched in Cadence v1.8.9 (Mainnet 28). |
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.
1,698,050,266 FLOW are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 73.6% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 22.1% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Nodes or validators | 301 |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
1.25B FLOW created at genesis (Oct 2020): ecosystem fund 32%, pre-launch backers + community sale 30%, Dapper Labs 20%, development team 18%, against current total supply 1,698,050,266 FLOW (FlowToken.totalSupply via Flow access API, 2026-10-23).
30% (374.8M FLOW) went to pre-launch backers and a community sale combined; Dapper Labs raised venture funding; exact amounts per round not established here.
Flow's supply page lists 374,800,000 FLOW for pre-launch backers plus the CoinList community sale (Sep-Oct 2020), fully unlocked by October 2022. 374.8M / 1,698.05M total supply (FlowToken.totalSupply, 2026-10-23) = 22.1%.
About 5% of supply a year is minted and paid weekly to staked node operators and their delegators (operators keep an 8% delegation fee); no treasury or foundation share of issuance is documented.
Sources: flow.com · tokenomist.ai · developers.flow.com · developers.flow.com · flow.com · rest-mainnet.onflow.org. Researched 2026-10-24, medium confidence.
Alleged an unregistered security by the SEC (2023 complaint); not named a commodity in 2026 and not adjudicated — status unsettled.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Flow is #86 among cryptocurrencies and #510 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 424 places between Flow'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 2 wrapped and staked claims on Flow →