Karlsen ranks #272 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #2542: 2270 of the 2541 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 2808 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 81% are tokens, 16% are claims on other assets and 3% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 73/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #272 |
| Rank counting claims | #2542 |
| Market capitalisation | $309,119 |
| Price | $0.000102 |
| Circulating supply | 3,029,682,796 KLS |
| Maximum supply | 4,961,000,000 KLS |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | KarlsenHashV2 (FishHash) |
| Own hashrate | 17 GH/s |
| Network purpose | Payments |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | No premine |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
B — 73 out of 100, provisional (from 18 of 20 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 64 to 76 (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 (Source) | 7.9 | group average, 11 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 8 | 4.8 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 8.4 | fixed maximum supply of 4.96 billion: supply scale 6.8, cap 10 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✗ | 2 full years since its first recorded price, no halt, freeze or reversal in five years |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | ✓ | no authority can freeze, blacklist or set apart a coin |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 8 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $1.0e-12 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✓ | typical fee $1e-9; about 250 transactions a second (6.2 on the throughput scale; 5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Verifiability: open-source nodes and checking without a trusted server | ✓ | node software open source; pruned nodes validate everything |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 4 | 2 of 5 passed 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) | ✗ | rusty-karlsen (Kaspa fork) relays transactions without origin hiding. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | Transparent transactions: amounts are public on chain. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | Transparent addresses: sender and receiver are public on chain. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 5.9 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $1e-9 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 6.2 | about 250 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 1 second |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 0.5 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 300 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 3.3 | 1 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | One block a second, but GHOSTDAG confirmation is probabilistic and rusty-karlsen's mempool implements replace-by-fee (RbfPolicy), so fast blocks alone do not qualify. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Pruning is built into the Kaspa-derived node: it keeps only data above the pruning point by default. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | No SPV-style light client in the Kaspa/Karlsen node; wallets trust a node. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 6 | 4 of 6 points, 3 not yet measured source |
| Miners paid a day ($1,000 0, $10 million or more 10), 2 points | 0 | about $172 a day |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✓ | |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | – | |
| Largest three under 75% | – | |
| More than one maintained client | ✓ | 2 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | The volunteer Karlsen Network team maintains rusty-karlsen (ISC) and the Go karlsend, both forks of Kaspa; no company controls it. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | – | |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 3.3 | 3 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance | 0 | No token issuance on the chain itself |
| Smart contracts: scripting for spending conditions | 1 | Kaspa-derived txscript limited to spending conditions; the KIP-10 introspection upgrade (crescendo_activation) is unscheduled on Karlsen mainnet. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | OpCheckMultiSig, OpCheckLockTimeVerify and OpCheckSequenceVerify in rusty-karlsen txscript. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | HTLCs expressible with hash opcodes and OpCheckLockTimeVerify in txscript. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | No exchange in the protocol. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No protocol-level cross-chain messaging. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✗ | No token or NFT type in the consensus rules. |
| Decentralisation | 10 | section average, 6 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level party can freeze, blacklist or claw back coins or halt the chain. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: The volunteer Karlsen Network team maintains rusty-karlsen (ISC) and the Go karlsend, both forks of Kaspa; no company controls it. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | — | Not yet counted |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 10 | 0% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Genesis carries an empty UTXO commitment (EMPTY_MUHASH) and the coinbase code has no developer output, so everything is mined from block one; listing sites and the project describe no premine and no ICO. source |
| Fundraising | 10 | No sale of the coin source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. Coinbase pays the block subsidy and fees to miners only; no developer fund in rusty-karlsen's coinbase code. source |
| Supply & Demand | 4.8 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 2.8 | average of 5 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 1 | 1 exchange |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 0 | $670 traded in 24 hours; #3463 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 2, $715) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 2.9 | 0.23% of its market cap a day, median of the last 3 days |
| 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 | $309K, 0 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 10 | no futures, options or margin on the exchanges read |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 6.8 | fixed maximum supply of 4.96 billion |
| Record | 4.7 | 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) | 2 | 2 full years since 2023-12-12, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 2 | 1 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 2 of 6 | ✓ | 18 commits in 2 of the last 12 months (github.com/karlsen-network/rusty-karlsen); rusty-karlsen v3.1.0 (2026-02-13) and v3.0.0-pre (2025-05-13) are the only reference-client releases in the last 24 months (Go karlsend v2.3.0, 2026-02-12); last commit February 2026. |
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.
3,029,682,796 of a maximum 4,961,000,000 KLS are in circulation — 61.1% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | No sale and no investor round |
Genesis carries an empty UTXO commitment (EMPTY_MUHASH) and the coinbase code has no developer output, so everything is mined from block one; listing sites and the project describe no premine and no ICO.
No ICO or presale found.
No sale documented.
Coinbase pays the block subsidy and fees to miners only; no developer fund in rusty-karlsen's coinbase code.
Mainnet started around November 2023 (back-calculated from the DAA score of the September 2024 hard fork). The table's total, 4.961B KLS, matches the input max. The inflation figure assumes the DAA score has tracked wall-clock time at 1 BPS; the 10-BPS 'crescendo' upgrade is not activated on mainnet. With all Karlsen web infrastructure unreachable, the network's current state could not be checked.
Sources: github.com · github.com · github.com · github.com · github.com. Researched 2026-10-26, medium confidence.
Karlsen is secured by 17 GH/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.
Karlsen is #272 among cryptocurrencies and #2542 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 2270 places between Karlsen'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).