NEAR Protocol ranks #12 of 508 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #19: 7 of the 18 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 12 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 9 are claims on other assets and 3 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 69/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #12 |
| Rank counting claims | #19 |
| Market capitalisation | $6.2B |
| Price | $4.70 |
| Circulating supply | 1,310,162,133 NEAR |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Nightshade (Doomslug) |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| 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.
B — 69 out of 100, provisional (from 16 of 17 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 65 to 71 (B to B).
| 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, 5 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 4 | 4 of 10 passed source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✓ | Nightshade (Doomslug) |
| 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 freeze, blacklist or halt authority over ordinary accounts. |
| No central team | ✗ | nearcore, the only full-node implementation, is developed by Near One under the NEAR Foundation umbrella. |
| Fees under one cent | ✓ | typical fee $0.0002 |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | Doomslug blocks every ~0.6 s reach BFT finality within about two blocks, roughly 1–2 seconds. |
| 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) | 10 | typical fee $0.0002 |
| Throughput (1,000 transactions a second or more 10) | 10 | about 33,000 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 0.6 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 2.24 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 2240 MB per 10 minutes |
| Security (9 checks) | 5 | 5 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% | ✓ | 5.61% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 14.15% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | nearcore, the only full-node implementation, is developed by Near One under the NEAR Foundation umbrella. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 803,769 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) | 8.7 | 397 active validators or block producers (source: Current) |
| 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) | ✗ | nearcore forwards transactions to chunk producers directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Nightshade light-client spec: block-producer approvals and Merkle proofs verified from light block headers. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | nearcore garbage-collects data older than gc_num_epochs_to_keep (default 5 epochs); only archival nodes keep full history. |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✗ | No native 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 | 4.9 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2.4 | 76.4% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 1,000,000,000 NEAR created at genesis on 22 April 2020, all allocated (team, backers, foundation, grants, community sale, early ecosystem), against a current total supply of 1,309,745,711 NEAR (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23). source |
| Fundraising | 2.4 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 76.4% of supply was theirs to sell, 29.2% sold so far. Genesis (Apr 2020) sales: backers 17.6% + small backers 6.1% (176M + 61M) and the Aug 2020 CoinList community sale ~120M = 357M NEAR; the NEAR Foundation also sold treasury tokens in the Jan 2022 $150M (Three Arrows) and Apr 2022 $350M (Tiger Global) rounds, units undisclosed (estimated ~30-50M at ~$10-15). 357M-407M / 1,309,745,711 NEAR (2026-10-23) = 27.3-31.1%, midpoint 29.2%. Prior backers came in through convertible notes and private rounds; no single backer holds more than 3.5% of the initial supply (NEAR blog). Secondary breakdowns list a pre-seed round at 2.16% and private round 2 at 8.43%. A CoinList community sale in 2020 sold about 120M NEAR (12%) in tiers at $0.29, $0.34 and $0.40. Total dollars raised were not verified here. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.8 | Developer share: about 2.4% of today's supply received so far; 10% of each new block reward goes to them today. Each epoch, 10% of the newly minted NEAR goes to the protocol treasury account (treasury.near). The rate is hard-coded at 1/10 for mainnet in nearcore's reward_calculator.rs, and the treasury is paid in full even when validator uptime cuts their share. The rule has applied since genesis (April 2020) and was unchanged when max inflation was halved from 5% to 2.5% on 30 Oct 2025. Net minting is 1,309.82M - 1,000M = 309.8M, plus a few million burned in fees, so the treasury has received roughly 31M, about 2.4% of supply. source |
| Supply & Demand | 7.2 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.1 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 41 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 9.65 | $278,208,887 traded in 24 hours; #8 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 30, $501,498,589) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.3 | 6.8% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 8.2 | $17,568,143 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.29% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 1 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9.5 | $6.2B, 9.5 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 2 | perpetual open interest 18% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 6.2 | no fixed maximum; 1.31 billion in circulation |
| Record | 8.7 | 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) | 6 | 6 full years since 2020-10-14, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 10 | 5 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 2,592 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/near/nearcore); nearcore 2.14.0-rc.6 published 2026-10-22, with frequent stable 2.x releases through 2026. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | nearcore 2.10.7 (Mar 2026) and 2.13.4 (Sep 2026): fixed critical node crash/DoS flaws. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | 600 ms blocks with 1.2 s finality, May 2025; shards raised to 9 and automatic resharding in nearcore 2.13, 2026. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | nearcore 2.13, 2026: standardized post-quantum signature scheme for accounts. |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes, +2 | ✓ | NEP-141 fungible-token contracts on its Wasm runtime, open to any account. |
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.
1,310,162,133 NEAR are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 76.4% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 29.2% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 2.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 10% |
| Nodes or validators | 397 |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
1,000,000,000 NEAR created at genesis on 22 April 2020, all allocated (team, backers, foundation, grants, community sale, early ecosystem), against a current total supply of 1,309,745,711 NEAR (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23).
Prior backers came in through convertible notes and private rounds; no single backer holds more than 3.5% of the initial supply (NEAR blog). Secondary breakdowns list a pre-seed round at 2.16% and private round 2 at 8.43%. A CoinList community sale in 2020 sold about 120M NEAR (12%) in tiers at $0.29, $0.34 and $0.40. Total dollars raised were not verified here.
Genesis (Apr 2020) sales: backers 17.6% + small backers 6.1% (176M + 61M) and the Aug 2020 CoinList community sale ~120M = 357M NEAR; the NEAR Foundation also sold treasury tokens in the Jan 2022 $150M (Three Arrows) and Apr 2022 $350M (Tiger Global) rounds, units undisclosed (estimated ~30-50M at ~$10-15). 357M-407M / 1,309,745,711 NEAR (2026-10-23) = 27.3-31.1%, midpoint 29.2%.
Each epoch, 10% of the newly minted NEAR goes to the protocol treasury account (treasury.near). The rate is hard-coded at 1/10 for mainnet in nearcore's reward_calculator.rs, and the treasury is paid in full even when validator uptime cuts their share. The rule has applied since genesis (April 2020) and was unchanged when max inflation was halved from 5% to 2.5% on 30 Oct 2025. Net minting is 1,309.82M - 1,000M = 309.8M, plus a few million burned in fees, so the treasury has received roughly 31M, about 2.4% of supply.
Sources: near.org · research.coinone.co.kr · betoken.substack.com · github.com · nomicon.io · blog.nearone.org. Researched 2026-10-24, low 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.
NEAR Protocol is #12 among cryptocurrencies and #19 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 7 places between NEAR Protocol'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 3 wrapped and staked claims on NEAR Protocol →