Primecoin ranks #235 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #1873: 1638 of the 1872 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 2116 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 77% are tokens, 18% are claims on other assets and 5% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | pending — launch under review |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #235 |
| Rank counting claims | #1873 |
| Market capitalisation | $1M |
| Price | $0.0201 |
| Circulating supply | 59,817,341 XPM |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | Prime-chain (Cunningham chains) |
| Own hashrate | — |
| 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.
Grade pending. What Primecoin pays its miners is not yet measured. A grade is not given until it is, so that a coin is never rated higher for what is not yet known.
| 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) | 7.5 | group average, 11 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 7.5 | 4.5 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 4.7 | no fixed maximum; 59.8 million in circulation: supply scale 9.4, cap 0 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✓ | 13 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 $2.0e-10 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✗ | typical fee $0.00048; about 74 transactions a second (4.2 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; light clients verify from headers or proofs |
| 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) | ✗ | Bitcoin-derived node relays its own transactions over clearnet by default; Tor (-proxy/-onion) needs user setup and there is no Dandelion. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | Transparent UTXO amounts; no confidential-transaction or shielded feature. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | Transparent addresses; no ring signatures, ZK proofs or stealth addresses. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 6.4 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.00048 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 4.2 | about 74 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 6.4 | a block every 1 minute |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 8 | 1 MB limit, 10 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 3.3 | 1 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | Most reachable nodes run Primecoin 0.2.0 on a Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 base, which accepts BIP125 opt-in replace-by-fee; no instant locks; 60 s blocks. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✗ | Primecoin v0.1.5 (Bitcoin 0.8 base) has no -prune option. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Bitcoin 0.8-based node serves BIP37 merkleblocks for SPV. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 3 | 2 of 6 points, 3 not yet measured source |
| Miners paid a day ($1,000 0, $10 million or more 10), 2 points | – | |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | – | |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✗ | 98.4% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✗ | 99.8% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 0 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Volunteer maintainers in the primecoin GitHub organisation since founder Sunny King stepped away; MIT licence. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✗ | about 272 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 1.1 | 1 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance | 0 | No token issuance on the chain itself |
| Smart contracts: scripting for spending conditions | 1 | Bitcoin 0.8-era Script (src/script.cpp) with spending conditions only. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✗ | OP_CHECKMULTISIG is present, but OP_NOP2/OP_NOP3 stay no-ops (no CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY or CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY) in the current master, so outputs cannot carry time-locked spending conditions. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✗ | Without CLTV/CSV no script refund path can be time-locked, so an HTLC cannot be expressed in an output. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | No exchange in the protocol. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No cross-chain feature in the protocol. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✗ | No token or NFT type in the protocol. |
| Decentralisation | 10 | section average, 6 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level freeze or checkpoint key; plain proof of work. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: Volunteer maintainers in the primecoin GitHub organisation since founder Sunny King stepped away; MIT licence. 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. Launched 7 July 2013 by Sunny King with no genesis allocation; every block reward follows TargetGetMint (999 / difficulty^2 XPM) from block one. 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. The protocol pays the whole mint to the block finder. The 1% 'donation' in mikaelh's high-performance miner is an optional client-side setting, not a protocol cut. source |
| Supply & Demand | 4.8 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 0.1 | average of 2 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 0 | no exchange the site reads trades it |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | – | no volume reported |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | – | not measured |
| 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) | 0.2 | $1.2M, 0.2 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | – | not measured |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 9.4 | no fixed maximum; 59.8 million in circulation |
| Record | 6.7 | 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 | 13 full years since 2013-07-11, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 0 | 1 positive, 4 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 2.5 of 6 | ✓ | 10 commits in 5 of the last 12 months (github.com/primecoin/primecoin); Last tagged release v0.2.0xpm-test-rc9 (2022-05-17); no release in the last 24 months, though commits continued on master into February 2026. |
| Negative | ||
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-07-03, −1 | ✗ | CVE-2024-52914: crafted orphan transactions can stall the node for hours in the uninterruptible orphan-resolution loop; still in Primecoin v0.1.5xpm. |
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-07-03, −1 | ✗ | CVE-2020-14198: misbehaving peers are auto-banned into an unbounded ban list, so many attacker addresses can exhaust CPU and memory; still in Primecoin v0.1.5xpm. |
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-07-31, −1 | ✗ | CVE-2024-52919: addr-message spam can overflow the address manager's 32-bit id counter and crash the node, with no addr rate limit; still in Primecoin v0.1.5xpm. |
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-09-18, −1 | ✗ | CVE-2019-25220: a long low-difficulty header chain can exhaust memory because the node has no headers pre-synchronisation; still in Primecoin v0.1.5xpm. |
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.
59,817,341 XPM are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| 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 |
Launched 7 July 2013 by Sunny King with no genesis allocation; every block reward follows TargetGetMint (999 / difficulty^2 XPM) from block one.
No sale or presale.
The protocol pays the whole mint to the block finder. The 1% 'donation' in mikaelh's high-performance miner is an optional client-side setting, not a protocol cut.
clients is 0 because no implementation has had a release in the last 24 months. One miner address found 98.4% of recent blocks, so a single party controls block production. Searches found no 51% attack or reorg, but such an event would not show up later without live monitoring.
Sources: github.com · github.com · chainz.cryptoid.info · chainz.cryptoid.info · en.wikipedia.org. Researched 2026-10-26, medium confidence.
No source we can reach publishes a hashrate for Primecoin.
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.
Primecoin is #235 among cryptocurrencies and #1873 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 1638 places between Primecoin'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).