How the CoinSpectrum Grade is scored: seventeen criteria, supply and demand read live

The seventeen criteria

Tokens are graded on ten criteria of their own: the host chain, the asset class, who can mint more, premine, fundraising, the host chain's security, holder concentration, liquidity, supply and record. The full method, with every scale, is on the grade method page.

Checks for properties, scales for degrees

The method draws one line through everything it measures. A property an asset either has or does not, such as a capped supply, a UTXO ledger or more than one maintained client, is a check worth 1 point. Two criteria are built of checks: the Cryptocurrency Standards (ten) and network security (nine), each scaled to 10 over the checks measured, and only once at least six are. A measure of degree, such as how many nodes run a network, is a scale from 0 to 10, because a network of 560 nodes and one of 20 are not the same thing, and a single check cannot say so.

A reader can tick through every check on an asset's page: each one shows its result and the source it was read from.

Consensus: two ladders

Consensus families (proof of work, proof of stake, delegated proof of stake and the rest) are ranked two ways: by the market cap of each family's largest chain, and by the combined market cap of all its chains. Token classes (stablecoins, tokens, claims, memecoins) take the places after every family, and the places are spaced evenly from 10 at the top to 0 at the bottom. Both ladders follow the market, so they move if the market moves; today proof of work leads both. From 25 October the two ladders were briefly averaged into one criterion; from 26 October they are two criteria again, so neither is diluted.

Decentralisation on three scales

Who can mint. Who produces blocks, and so issues new coins, as a ladder of consensus families. Proof of work comes first, proof of stake second and hybrid proof of work and stake third, since it runs both of the first two models; every other family follows by the combined market cap of its chains, then Other, a bucket of models not yet classified rather than a family, and tokens issued by a founder or company, such as USDT, take the last place at 0. The places are spaced evenly to one decimal: on 27 October proof of work 10, proof of stake 8.6, hybrid 7.1, federated 5.7, proof of authority 4.3, proof of space 2.9 and Other 1.4. A family is how a chain makes its blocks: BFT and DAG, ways of finishing blocks that run inside several families, are not families of their own, and their chains sit in the family that makes their blocks, mostly proof of stake. In a family that mixes open and permissioned variants, such as proof of stake, a chain whose block producers are admitted from a permissioned list loses 1 point; a federated or proof-of-authority chain does not, since admission is what those families are. "Anyone can mint" also stays the first of the Cryptocurrency Standards.

Nodes. Reachable full nodes counted by a network crawler, or the active validator set where no crawler counts the network, on a logarithmic scale over the whole range: one node, a single point of failure, scores 0 and 1,000 or more score 10, each doubling worth about a point, so 10 nodes score 3.3, 30 nodes 4.9 and 100 nodes 6.7, to one decimal. Collateral slots and validator keys are not counted as nodes, since one operator can hold any number of them. A block explorer's list of its own peers is a floor, not a count, and is not used; a network with no reliable count is left unmeasured rather than guessed. The node count used to be a check inside network security; it moved here, which is why security now has nine checks.

Holder concentration is the third scale. It is not collected yet, which is why every grade is still marked provisional.

Supply & Demand: six measures

Supply & Demand, the criterion for liquidity, is the average of six measures, each shown on its own row of an asset's grade table. The site's collector reads the spot markets of about two dozen exchanges every minute and recomputes three of them each time; futures are read every ten minutes, and market cap is rescored from the live price. An asset's page rescores its liquidity row live and says when it last did. The letter itself uses the figures read when the grade was built.

Exchanges. Distinct exchange companies with a live market: ten or more scores 10.

Volume rank. Every listed asset ranked by its median day of trading volume over the last 30 days. First place scores 10, falling evenly to 0.05 at 200th, and 0 below the top 200. This rewards size: a large asset trades more because it is large.

Turnover. Daily volume as a share of market cap, the median over 30 days, the measure the volume rank cannot give. A market cap is the last price multiplied by the whole supply; turnover shows how much of that supply the price is actually set by. Where little trades, each trade moves the price further: over the six months to October 2026, a day's trading of 1% of market cap moved the price about 12% where turnover was under 0.2% a day, and about 1% where it was 2 to 5%. It is not a forecast of calm: the site tested that and found more active markets more volatile, not less. What turnover does go with is depth: in a snapshot of the order books on five exchanges, the dollars resting within 2% of the price rose about thirtyfold, as a share of market cap, from under 0.2% turnover to 3 to 5%. For coins over $10 million the book reached its full depth by about 4% and gained little beyond 6%, where a day's trading grew from 10 to 17 times the book to 36 to 100 times, and above about 5% the book stopped deepening. So 5% a day scores 10, and the score falls by the same amount for each tenfold step away from it in either direction: 1% scores 6.3, 25% 6.3. Above 100% a day the volume and the market cap cannot both be right: turnover is left out and the asset leaves the volume rank. A stablecoin counts every pair quoted in it and has no ceiling, since its price does not move with its trading. One day's figure would change the score almost every other day, so the grade uses the 30-day median.

Order-book depth. The dollars of bids and asks resting within 2% of the price on the spot books of nine exchanges (Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate, MEXC, Bitget, KuCoin, Coinbase and Kraken), as a share of market cap. Turnover says how much of the supply trades; depth says how much of the market cap the books would absorb if holders sold. It is read four times a day and graded on the median of the last 30 days, on a log scale: 0.001% of market cap or less scores 0, each tenfold step adds 3.3, and 1% or more scores 10, so 0.01% scores 3.3 and 0.1% 6.7. The largest coins score lowest on it, because no book is built in proportion to a trillion-dollar market cap; they score highest on market cap and volume rank instead. Where an exchange serves fewer price levels than reach 2%, the figure is a lower bound and the row says so. An asset none of the nine lists is not measured rather than scored 0.

Market cap. The size of the market a holder can sell into, on a log scale: $1 million or less scores 0, each tenfold step adds 2.5, and $10 billion or more scores 10, so $100 million scores 5 and $1 billion 7.5. Without it a $2 million coin with one busy exchange could sit level with a $1 billion one.

Futures exposure. Open interest in perpetual futures on Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate, MEXC and Hyperliquid, as a share of market cap. A perpetual contract lets anyone hold or short the price without holding the coin, so open interest is paper supply beside the real one, and a price carried by it follows leverage and forced liquidations rather than buyers and sellers of the coin. The less of it, the better: 0.5% of market cap or less scores 10, 2% 8, 5% 6, 10% 4, 20% 2, above 30% 0. An asset with no perpetual listed on those exchanges scores 10. A contract counts only where its price agrees with the asset's, so a namesake's futures are not counted against it.

On 26 October 2026 Bitcoin turned over 0.4% of its market cap a day and carried futures open interest of 2.0%; with 47 exchanges and the first place by volume, its liquidity was 7.5. Ethereum turned over 0.9% with open interest of 7.1%. Both figures for every asset are published each minute at /api/v1/liquidity.json.

Age

A chain that has run for years has survived markets, attacks and upgrades that a new one has not met yet. Age scores 1 point for each full year since the genesis block, 10 from ten years, and sits in the record group. A chain that split from another and kept its ledger counts from the parent's genesis, because that history is its own: Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV and eCash from Bitcoin's of January 2009, Ethereum Classic from Ethereum's of July 2015. A chain that copies another's genesis block and starts its own ledger at block 1 counts from block 1: Dingocoin's block 0 is Dogecoin's, and its block 1 was mined in April 2021. Where no genesis date is researched yet, the first day with a recorded price stands in, which can only understate the age.

When a grade is pending

A coin gets no letter until its launch is known (premine, fundraising and consensus), at least six of its nine security checks are measured, and, for a mined chain, what its miners are paid. A chain whose block subsidy has ended counts as measured at zero. On the day of writing, 310 cryptocurrencies were pending and 198 had a letter.

What it moved

In the build of 26 October 2026, 4 cryptocurrencies graded A++, 31 A+ and 25 A. Bitcoin stayed at the top with 94: it misses the Cryptocurrency Standards checks for sub-cent fees, payments safe within seconds and protocol privacy, and turns over little of its value, but scores 10 almost everywhere else. Ethereum graded B (71), held back by its premine and fundraising, proof of stake (7 on who can mint), six of nine security checks and four of the ten whitepaper checks.

Bitcoin Cash sat at the boundary and crossed it twice on 26 October. It fell from A++ to A+ when futures exposure joined liquidity, a score that had rounded up to 90 rounding down to 89, and rose back to A++ when the node scale became logarithmic: its 560 reachable nodes had scored 6 on the old steps, which gave 10 only at 10,000, and score 9.2 on the new one. Its launch, ladders, issuance and record score 10, and it passes nine of the ten whitepaper checks. It loses points on security (its miners are paid about $124,000 a day, under the $1 million check, and its hashrate is a small share of SHA-256's) and on liquidity (volume ranked around 100th, turnover of 0.6% a day, futures open interest of 4.3%).

The equal weights have a visible effect, and it is stated rather than corrected: a small proof-of-work chain with a clean launch scores 10 on both ladders, on who can mint and on all three issuance criteria, so it can reach A or A+ with weak security and a thin market. Ravencoin, Ergo and Bitcoin SV graded A+ on 26 October. A network whose node count is not yet measured is also graded without it, which helps a chain with a small network until the count arrives.

Two changes on 27 October narrowed that effect without changing the weights. Age gives a chain of ten years or more a point a newer chain cannot have, and market cap inside liquidity counts the size of the market behind a coin. Dingocoin, a 2021 chain worth about $2 million, had graded A+ with 85 and sat above Ethereum Classic; with age, market cap and a correction (it is merge-mined with Litecoin, so it fails the own-hashrate check), it graded A with 80, beside Ethereum Classic's 79.

What the grade does not claim

The grade measures how an asset is built and traded against a stated standard. It is not a forecast, a credit rating or a probability of failure, and it has not been backtested. Every build since 24 October 2026 is archived at /api/grades-history/ so that the test can be run on the record by anyone.

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