Bitcoin 21 ranks #441 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #5480: 5039 of the 5479 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.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | pending — launch under review |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #441 |
| Rank counting claims | #5480 |
| Price | $0.00326 |
| Circulating supply | 0 XBTC21 |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Hybrid |
| Consensus mechanism | SHA-256 PoW + PoS |
| Own hashrate | — |
| Network purpose | Payments |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
Grade pending. Fewer than six of Bitcoin 21's nine network-security points are measured yet. 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) | 4.5 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 4.5 | Hybrid: 4.5 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 4.5 | Hybrid: 4.5 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 3.8 | group average, 9 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 5 | 2 of 4 points, 2 not yet measured source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | – | |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✓ | 10 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 | – | |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 8 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $3.3e-11 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✗ | about 42 transactions a second (3.3 on the throughput scale; 5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Verifiability: open-source nodes and checking without a trusted server | ✗ | no light clients or pruned nodes |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 4 | 2 of 5 passed source |
| Whitepaper privacy: keys are not tied to an identity | ✓ | Bitcoin 21's Bitcoin-derived node (bitcoin21/v1.0) has no identity rule: anyone generates keys and receives and sends the coin. |
| 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 21 source (Apr 2016): no Dandelion relay in the node; Tor is only an optional proxy setting (-tor/-onion) the user must configure. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): Bitcoin-style transparent outputs; no confidential amounts. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): Bitcoin-style transparent addresses; no ring signatures, zero-knowledge spends or stealth addresses. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 4.7 | average of 4 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | – | not yet measured |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 3.3 | about 42.1 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 8.4 | a block every 3.5 minutes |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 7 | 2 MB limit, 5.71 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 0 | 0 of 2 passed, 1 not yet researched |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | – | Client base not established; 210-second PoW/PoS blocks. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): no -prune option; the node keeps the full block history. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): hybrid PoW/PoS chain; stake blocks cannot be checked from headers without the UTXO set and the protocol has no light-client proof scheme. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | — | 1 of 2 points, 7 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% | – | |
| Largest three under 75% | – | |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 0 |
| Node software is open source | – | Single-team project (bitcoin21 GitHub account, 'Bitcoin 21 Foundation'); no licence file confirmed. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions 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 21 source (Apr 2016): Bitcoin-style Script (signatures, hashes, CHECKMULTISIG) limited to spending conditions; no contract platform. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): CHECKMULTISIG is present, but the script interpreter has no OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY or OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (the code base predates BIP65/BIP112), so no output can be time-locked. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): without a lock-time opcode Script cannot express the refund branch of an HTLC, and no adaptor-signature swap exists for the coin. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): no order book or market maker in the ledger rules. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): no cross-chain message or light-client verification in the protocol. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✗ | Bitcoin 21 source (Apr 2016): no token or NFT type in the consensus rules. |
| Decentralisation | 3.9 | section average, 5 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | — | Not yet researched |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: Single-team project (bitcoin21 GitHub account, 'Bitcoin 21 Foundation'); no licence file confirmed. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 7.1 | Hybrid: 7.1 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | — | Not yet counted |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 1.1 | 88.8% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. The ANN and README allocate a 6.3M premine in three 2.1M batches (1M '21 team', 1.1M IPO/ICO, 1M 'UK/HM Treasury', 1.1M 'UN/accepting countries', 2.1M poverty and humanitarian vaults); CoinMarketCap lists 7,093,108 total supply, so 6.3M / 7.09M = 88.8%. source |
| Fundraising | 1.1 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 88.8% of supply was theirs to sell. Up to 1.1M (15.5% of supply) was offered in an 'IPO/ICO' until the first exchange listing; the amount actually sold is not published. IPO/ICO of up to 1.1M premined coins (also covering faucets and giveaways), announced December 2015; launch 2016-04-17. Price and proceeds not disclosed. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No dev share in block rewards is described; allocations were all premined. source |
| Supply & Demand | 0 | group average, 1 of 2 measured |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 0 | average of 1 measure |
| 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) | – | not measured |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | – | not measured |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | – | not measured |
| Supply (smaller is better) | — | Supply not reported |
| 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 | 10 full years since 2016-05-05, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 0 | 0 positive, 4 negative source |
| Negative | ||
| Steady work, 0 of 6 | ✗ | 0 commits in 0 of the last 12 months (github.com/bitcoin21/v1.0); The bitcoin21/v1.0 repository has had no commit since 2016-04-17 (launch day) and no releases. |
| 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 Bitcoin 21 HEAD. |
| 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 Bitcoin 21 HEAD. |
| 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 Bitcoin 21 HEAD. |
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.
0 XBTC21 are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 88.8% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
The ANN and README allocate a 6.3M premine in three 2.1M batches (1M '21 team', 1.1M IPO/ICO, 1M 'UK/HM Treasury', 1.1M 'UN/accepting countries', 2.1M poverty and humanitarian vaults); CoinMarketCap lists 7,093,108 total supply, so 6.3M / 7.09M = 88.8%.
IPO/ICO of up to 1.1M premined coins (also covering faucets and giveaways), announced December 2015; launch 2016-04-17. Price and proceeds not disclosed.
Up to 1.1M (15.5% of supply) was offered in an 'IPO/ICO' until the first exchange listing; the amount actually sold is not published.
No dev share in block rewards is described; allocations were all premined.
Premine batches are labelled for 'UK/HM Treasury' and 'UN/accepting countries', with no evidence of any arrangement with those bodies. Market cap about $2.6k; the chain appears dead.
Sources: bitcointalk.org · github.com · coinmarketcap.com. Researched 2026-10-26, low confidence.
No source we can reach publishes a hashrate for Bitcoin 21.
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.
Bitcoin 21 is #441 among cryptocurrencies and #5480 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 5039 places between Bitcoin 21'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).