By consensus

Every cryptocurrency in the ranking grouped by how its chain agrees with itself — the mechanism, not the marketing. 527 chains across 8 families, $2.48T combined.

Proof of Work

Chains whose next block is chosen by whoever first finds a valid answer to a computational puzzle — a miner's expected reward is proportional to the work they burn.

50 chains$1.77T combined

Proof of Stake

Chains whose next block is chosen by validators who stake the chain's own coin as collateral.

65 chains$556.6B combined

BFT / Tendermint-class

Chains whose blocks are agreed on by a fixed committee of validators running a Byzantine-fault-tolerant protocol — Tendermint, HotStuff, or a close relative.

40 chains$32.9B combined

DAG / non-linear

Chains whose ledger is a directed acyclic graph rather than a single chain of blocks.

8 chains$4.4B combined

Proof of Space / Storage

Chains whose next block is chosen by proving reserved disk space — a "plot" laid down in advance, then queried against a challenge.

3 chains$1.1B combined

Hybrid

Chains that combine two of the mechanisms above.

12 chains$792M combined

Federated

Chains whose consensus is reached among a defined federation of validators — an RPCA on XRPL, Federated Byzantine Agreement on Stellar, Proof of Authority variants, or a permissioned quorum.

11 chains$108.9B combined

Other

Chains whose consensus mechanism does not fit any of the categories above — Avalanche-family gossip protocols, threshold cryptography schemes, Proof of Importance, Proof of Burn, or otherwise custom rules.

338 chains$10.5B combined

The taxonomy — what counts as which family — is the same one applied to every asset page in the ranking. Wrapped, staked and pegged claims are never counted here.