Frequently asked questions

An asset with its own base-layer blockchain and its own consensus mechanism. It mints itself on a rule no committee can override and settles peer-to-peer, with no intermediary able to freeze it. Four properties follow from that design: no mint, no confiscation surface, pseudonymity, and its own consensus on its own chain. The name says as much — crypto comes from the Greek kryptós, hidden. The long explanation walks through the etymology and the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Every unit of value enters the total one time, as the asset it actually is. Bitcoin is counted; a wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum is a claim on that same Bitcoin, so counting it as well would enter the same value twice. The ranking therefore holds 527 cryptocurrencies, and everything else the site tracks is listed separately, under what it is.

Anything whose value is another asset: wrapped and staked coins, fiat-pegged stablecoins, debt-minted synthetics, tokenised treasuries and commodities. A claim cannot exist without the thing it points to. Claims are listed with their peg, their backing and their host chain, and never added to the cryptocurrency total, because the thing they represent is either already counted or not a cryptocurrency at all.

They list every ticker on every venue: Bitcoin, then Wrapped Bitcoin, then a Coinbase-wrapped Bitcoin — the same value three times under three names — alongside stablecoins, tokens and memecoins. That list answers "what trades?". CoinSpectrum answers "which cryptocurrencies exist?", and the answer is 527. The rest is listed too, as the claims and tokens it is.

No. The test is technical: its own chain and its own consensus. Who holds the supply, whether a foundation can pause the chain, how many validators there are — those questions matter, and they are answered on each asset's own page rather than in whether it is counted. The ranking reports what the rule finds; the asset pages say what to make of it.

A fair launch starts with an empty supply: every coin in circulation was earned by mining or staking after the network went live. A pre-mine ships with an initial allocation — to founders, investors or a foundation — before anyone else could take part. Both can be cryptocurrencies under the counting rule. A filter on the ranking separates them, and a post on the difference explains why it shapes who holds a coin, who governs it and who gets to sell early.

A fork is counted only while it keeps its own mining, its own market and its own chain producing blocks. Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV all meet the test and are counted as three cryptocurrencies — why they are three. The fork-era attempts that lost their miners and their market within a year are not, because the rule cannot find them: their chains stopped.

The data pipeline can no longer find it, so it drops out of the ranking. Dozens of fork-era chains from 2017–2019 left this way. If a chain resumes producing blocks, it returns on the next refresh.

A token is a balance kept by a smart contract on someone else's chain — ERC-20 on Ethereum, BEP-20 on BNB Chain, SPL on Solana, TRC-20 on Tron. It produces no blocks and has no consensus of its own: the host chain's validators decide what happens to it, and whoever controls the contract can often change its rules or its supply. Tokens are listed with their host chain named and never counted. A token is not a cryptocurrency.

A token built to hold a fixed price against a reference asset, usually the US dollar. In the common fiat-backed model — USDT, USDC — a company holds the reserves, decides when units are minted and redeemed, and can freeze any address, which it does at law-enforcement request. That inverts two of the four properties that define a cryptocurrency. A stablecoin is a dollar moved on crypto rails: useful, but a claim on a currency rather than a currency of its own. How stablecoins are backed.

A stablecoin minted against collateral locked in a smart contract — a collateralised debt position. A user deposits an asset such as ETH and mints stablecoins worth less than the deposit; if the collateral falls too far, the contract sells it to cover the debt. MakerDAO's DAI is the reference case. No company holds the keys, but the coin is still a claim — on the collateral in the vault — so it is listed as a stablecoin and not counted.

A stablecoin that holds its peg by minting and burning a companion token instead of holding reserves. Terra's UST was the largest: in May 2022 redemptions outran the mechanism, the peg broke, and UST and LUNA fell close to zero within a week. The failure belonged to the peg design, not to any base-layer chain — one reason the site keeps pegged assets out of the cryptocurrency total.

A token that represents a physical commodity held by a custodian — PAX Gold and Tether Gold each stand for gold in a vault. Its price follows the commodity, and its value rests on the custodian honouring redemptions. It is listed among the stablecoins as a commodity-pegged claim.

Tokens representing traditional instruments — treasury bills, money-market funds, bonds, shares — issued by a regulated entity that holds the underlying. They carry the legal rights and restrictions of the instrument, often including a whitelist of who may hold them. The site lists them as security-pegged claims.

A token on one chain that represents an asset held on another. Wrapped BTC on Ethereum is a claim on a Bitcoin held in custody; cbBTC is a Coinbase-custodied Bitcoin re-issued as an Ethereum token. Both are priced against the original by design and are only as good as whoever holds it. Listed as claims; never counted, because the Bitcoin they represent already is. A wrapped Bitcoin is not a second Bitcoin.

A token minted on one chain when the original is locked by a bridge contract on another — structurally a wrapped asset whose custodian is code. Because every locked original sits in one place, bridges have been among the largest thefts in the industry. Listed as a claim.

A tradable receipt for coins locked in staking. Lido's stETH and Rocket Pool's rETH are receipts for staked Ether; they earn the staking yield while moving on-chain like any token. The Ether underneath is already counted, so the receipt is listed as a claim on it.

A coin whose appeal is a joke or a cultural reference rather than a technical purpose. Most are tokens launched on Solana, Ethereum or Base, often with much of the supply held by the launcher; they are listed as memecoins and never counted. Dogecoin is the exception that proves the rule: it began as a joke but runs its own chain with its own proof of work, so it passes the test and is counted as a cryptocurrency.

A non-fungible token: a chain entry recording who owns one specific item — an image, a domain name, a game object. The entry records who owns a pointer; the artwork itself usually sits on an ordinary server and can disappear. NFTs are not currencies in any sense the word carries, and the site does not track them.

A token that lets holders vote on a protocol's parameters — fees, treasury spending, upgrades. UNI and AAVE are examples. Voting power scales with holdings, so a handful of large holders often decide. It lives on a host chain and is listed as a token.

A token that pays for or unlocks a particular service — storage, compute, data feeds, in-game items. The site groups them by sector: DEX, DeFi, gaming, AI, storage, compute, Layer 2, oracle, DePIN. The sector describes what a project does; it has no bearing on whether it is counted.

Some are. A project that runs its own chain with its own consensus — Bittensor or Filecoin, for example — is counted, and its purpose is recorded on its page. A project issued as a token on Ethereum or Solana is a token. The label describes the project; the chain and the consensus are the test.

It depends where they live. BNB, KCS and CRO each run their own chain with its own validator set, so they pass the counting rule, and their purpose is recorded as an exchange chain. An exchange token issued on another chain is a token.

No. Arbitrum and Optimism are rollups that settle on Ethereum and inherit its security; ARB and OP are governance tokens that neither produce blocks nor secure anything — Ethereum does. The networks appear in the Layer 2 view of the ranking; the tokens are listed as tokens.

A cryptocurrency that hides amounts, senders or receivers — Monero by default through ring signatures and stealth addresses, Zcash through optional zero-knowledge proofs, Grin through Mimblewimble. They pass the counting rule like any other chain; privacy is their recorded purpose.

An initial coin offering: a project sells its asset to the public, usually against a whitepaper, before the product exists. Most of what was raised in the 2017–2018 ICO wave is gone. An ICO is a way of selling, not a category: a project that later launched its own chain with its own consensus is counted — Ethereum itself began with a 2014 presale — and one that stayed a token on another chain is listed as a token.

Into three groups: stablecoins — fiat-pegged, debt-based, commodity-, security- and crypto-pegged; wrapped and staked assets; and tokens, sorted by sector, with memecoins kept apart. Every listing names its host chain and what, if anything, backs it.

Decentralised finance: trading, lending and borrowing run by smart contracts instead of institutions. Anyone with a wallet can use them, with no account to open. Most of it runs on smart-contract chains — Ethereum and its Layer 2s, Solana, BNB Chain — and its tokens are listed as tokens.

A decentralised exchange is a set of contracts that swap assets straight from the user's wallet; nobody takes custody of the funds. A centralised exchange holds customers' coins in its own wallets and matches trades on its own books — faster, with fiat on-ramps, but the customer trusts the venue with custody. The site ranks the two separately.

Most DEXs price trades with an automated market maker: a pool holding two assets and a formula that moves the price as one side is bought. Liquidity providers deposit both assets and earn a share of the fees, at the risk of impermanent loss when the two prices drift apart.

Contracts where depositors lend assets into a pool and borrowers take them out against larger deposits of collateral. Interest rates float with demand, and positions that fall below their collateral requirement are liquidated automatically. Aave and Compound are the reference cases.

Total value locked: the value of assets deposited in DeFi contracts. It measures use, not issuance. Nearly everything locked is a cryptocurrency or a claim already counted somewhere else, so adding TVL to a market-cap total counts the same value twice.

Contracts that move value between chains by locking an asset on one side and minting a claim on the other. The locked originals sit in one place, which makes bridges prime targets: Ronin, Wormhole and Nomad lost over a billion dollars between them in 2022.

The rule a network uses to decide which of many possible histories is the real one. Without it, anyone could spend the same coin twice. Every cryptocurrency has one; a token borrows its host chain's.

Miners compete to solve a puzzle whose difficulty scales with the network; the first to solve it proposes the next block and collects the reward. Rewriting history means redoing that work faster than everyone else combined, which costs more than it pays. Bitcoin defined the model. Proof-of-work chains, grouped by algorithm, with what each network pays its miners.

Validators lock the chain's own coin as a bond and take turns proposing and attesting to blocks. Honest work earns rewards; signing two conflicting histories gets the bond slashed. Security is economic rather than physical. Ethereum has used proof of stake since September 2022.

Holders vote for a small set of block producers who run the chain on their behalf — TRON elects 27. It is fast, and the producer set is small enough to coordinate, or to be pressured.

A committee of validators votes on each block in rounds; once two-thirds agree, the block is final — no reorganisation later. Tendermint (CometBFT), used across the Cosmos ecosystem, is the best-known. Finality is fast and deterministic; the trade-off is a bounded validator set.

A ledger shaped as a directed acyclic graph instead of a single chain: each transaction or block references several earlier ones, and agreement is on the order of the graph. IOTA is an example. Kaspa builds a DAG of blocks but secures it with proof of work, so it sits with the proof-of-work chains.

The next block goes to whoever proves they have reserved disk space — "plots" written in advance and checked against a challenge. The collateral is storage rather than stake or electricity. Chia is the best-known example.

A chain combining two mechanisms, most often proof-of-work mining with a proof-of-stake layer that ratifies blocks or governs upgrades. Decred is the classic case.

A chain whose blocks are agreed by a defined set of validators rather than by anyone who joins — the XRP Ledger's validator lists, Stellar's quorum slices, proof-of-authority networks. It has its own chain and its own consensus, so it is counted. The difference is where trust sits: participation is by admission, so the reader is trusting the federation.

Chains whose consensus fits none of the named families — Avalanche's sampling protocol, the Internet Computer's threshold relay, proof of importance, proof of burn. Chains whose consensus has not yet been curated sit there too until it is.

The point after which a transaction cannot be reversed. On proof of work it is probabilistic: each new block makes a reversal exponentially more expensive, hence "wait six confirmations". BFT chains reach deterministic finality the moment a block is agreed.

Anyone controlling a majority of a proof-of-work chain's hashrate can rewrite recent history and spend coins twice. Small chains are exposed because renting that much hashpower can cost less than the gain: Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Gold were both attacked this way. It is why the share of an algorithm's hashrate a chain commands matters.

Mining two chains with the same work: a miner solving a block for one chain can submit the same proof to another that accepts it. Dogecoin is merge-mined with Litecoin — every Dogecoin block is found by miners working a parent chain, so its hashpower is borrowed, and the site shows it as merge-mined rather than crediting it as its own.

Block reward × blocks per day × price: what a proof-of-work network spends on its own security every day, and roughly what an attacker would have to outspend to overpower it. It appears for every mined chain on the proof-of-work page, beside its annual issuance — new supply as a share of what already circulates.

The hash function a proof-of-work chain asks miners to compute — SHA-256 for Bitcoin, Scrypt for Litecoin, RandomX for Monero. It decides which hardware can mine the chain efficiently, and therefore who can.

A SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts of work to produce, so an exahash of one and a terahash of the other are different units wearing the same suffix. Hashrate compares only within one algorithm, which is why the proof-of-work page groups chains that way. Hashrate is not one number.

An ASIC is a chip built for one algorithm — overwhelmingly efficient at it and useless for anything else; SHA-256, Scrypt, Equihash, X11 and kHeavyHash are ASIC-mined. GPU algorithms such as KAWPOW favour graphics cards. RandomX is designed for ordinary CPUs, so that anyone with a computer can take part.

SHA-256: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, eCash. Scrypt: Litecoin, Dogecoin. RandomX: Monero. Equihash: Zcash. kHeavyHash: Kaspa. Etchash: Ethereum Classic. KAWPOW: Ravencoin. X11: Dash. The full list, grouped, is on the proof-of-work page.

Difficulty sets how hard the puzzle is, so blocks keep arriving at the target pace however much hashpower joins or leaves. Bitcoin retunes it every 2,016 blocks — about two weeks — to hold ten-minute blocks; chains such as Bitcoin Cash and Dogecoin adjust on every block. Upcoming Bitcoin and Litecoin adjustments are estimated on the proof-of-work page.

A scheduled cut in the block reward. Bitcoin halves every 210,000 blocks, about four years — 50, 25, 12.5, 6.25, now 3.125 BTC — which is how its supply approaches 21 million without passing it. Litecoin halves every 840,000 blocks. The next ones are counted down on the proof-of-work page.

A chain that accepts blocks mined with several algorithms, so no single class of hardware can dominate. DigiByte runs five. Its hashrate is the sum of separate per-algorithm figures, and no single difficulty describes it.

Miners combining their hashpower and sharing rewards in proportion to work, which turns a rare large payout into a steady small one. The pool operator chooses which transactions go into its blocks, so a few large pools concentrate that power.

A ledger of transactions in which every block carries the hash of the one before it. Changing anything in a past block changes its hash and breaks every block after it, so history is append-only. The chain means something only because a network of nodes agrees on which chain is the real one — that agreement is consensus.

A network that runs on top of a base-layer cryptocurrency and inherits its security. Bitcoin's Lightning Network and Ethereum's rollups — Arbitrum, Optimism, Base — are the reference cases. Transactions execute cheaply on the Layer 2 but settle back onto the base chain, whose consensus has the final say; if the Layer-2 operators disappear, funds can still be recovered on the base chain.

A separate chain connected to a base layer by a two-way peg: coins move across, but the sidechain runs its own validators and its own consensus. Polygon PoS, Rootstock and Liquid are the reference cases. Its security is its own; if its validators are compromised, the base chain cannot help.

That is the distinction the site exists to draw. A Layer 2 inherits security from Bitcoin or Ethereum; a sidechain runs its own next to them. The site's founding question is who guards the security, and the two answers differ — so they get separate places.

A hard fork is a protocol upgrade that new nodes accept and old nodes reject — the rules changed. A chain split is what happens when that upgrade lacks the coordination it needs: two groups of nodes keep running two versions, and two chains exist from that block on. Hard fork vs chain split.

An upgrade that tightens the rules so old nodes still accept the new blocks. SegWit is the famous example — and the site argues it was a hard fork in function: SegWit: soft fork by classification, hard fork by function.

Two ways a chain records ownership. UTXO (unspent transaction output) tracks coins as discrete notes that each transaction consumes and creates; a balance is the sum of the notes a key can spend. Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin use it. The account model keeps a running balance per address, like a bank ledger — Ethereum and most newer chains. UTXO is easier to make private; accounts are simpler for smart contracts.

A single-asset ledger carries one native coin and nothing else — Litecoin, Monero, Dash. An overlay ledger carries a native coin plus tokens defined by convention on top of it, which the consensus rules themselves don't know about — Bitcoin's Runes and Ordinals, for instance. A multi-asset ledger treats issued assets as first-class objects the consensus validates — Stellar, the XRP Ledger, Bitcoin Cash with CashTokens. Chains by ledger type.

What the chain was built to do: payments, private payments, smart contracts, settlement, storage, compute, an exchange's own chain, and more. It describes a chain; it never decides whether it is counted. Chains by purpose.

Circulating supply is what exists and can move today; maximum supply is the most that can ever exist. Bitcoin's maximum is 21 million. Many chains have no fixed cap at all, and their pages say so — issuance simply continues.

By market capitalisation — price × circulating supply — after every claim has been removed. Rows whose reported trading is too thin to trust are hidden from the default view, and marked ⚠ when a search brings them up. The ranking can be filtered by consensus family, ledger type, purpose and launch type.

"Rank among cryptocurrencies" is the asset's place on this site's list. "Rank counting claims" is where it would sit on a list that also counts wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins. The gap between them is how many claims an ordinary ranking puts ahead of it.

Each exchange gets a composite score from 0 to 100, built from signals it largely cannot fake about itself: web traffic from the independent Tranco list, age, order-book liquidity read from its own API, reported volume discounted by how plausible it is against the venue's traffic, that plausibility ratio as a signal of its own, liquidity against volume, proof of reserves, KYC requirements and CoinGecko's trust grade.

Contradictions then demote: volume the traffic cannot support, books too thin for the trades reported on them, reserves below what the venue owes. Each one costs points and drops the venue below every venue that trips fewer. How CoinSpectrum ranks exchanges.

It is the one number an exchange cannot type about itself. Reported volume is the venue's own claim, and even an order book is produced by a matching engine the venue controls; how many people actually visit is measured independently. So traffic anchors the score, and a deep-looking book may demote a venue but never promote one. Why this site kept web traffic when CoinGecko dropped it.

An exchange showing that it holds the coins it owes its customers. Where a venue publishes its reserve addresses, every build reads them on chain and compares what they hold with what the venue says it owes — an open audit nobody has to take on trust, which scores highest. A signed third-party attestation sits just below; a page with nothing checkable sits lower still; and a chain holding less than the venue owes is the floor and a contradiction.

Bands of the same 0-100 score, from A down to F — a compact way to display it. The score can be shown as a number, a letter or a bar from profile settings, and hovering over it breaks down every signal, its weight and its points.

By 24-hour trading volume measured on chain, grouped by architecture: native to one chain, one protocol deployed across many chains, or true cross-chain swaps.

By what a reader is actually choosing on. For buying and spending: peer-to-peer first, then on-ramps and gift cards; within each, self-custody before merchant before escrow before custodial, and no KYC before limited KYC before full KYC. For services: decentralised networks first, then gateways, then conventional providers, and crypto payment before card-only. Web traffic only breaks ties.

Non-custodial wallets — the ones where the reader holds the keys — come first; custodial ones are listed but filtered out by default. Wallets the community favours for a given coin are marked ★, and the directory can be opened on one coin or several, as in /wallets/#BTC,XMR.

Never first. Custody and identity requirements lead, because they decide what a reader is trusting a service with; popularity settles ties inside a group.

What a regulator has said about the asset: commodity, security, contested, or unclassified where no regulator has taken a position. Most cryptocurrencies are unclassified, and the site prints that rather than guessing. Why the site prints "unclassified".

Directly from major exchanges — Binance, Coinbase, Gate.io, Bybit and Kraken in the browser, MEXC and KuCoin through the site's server — refreshed every 60 seconds, with more venues added over time. Where no exchange carries an asset, a six-hourly snapshot from CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap and CoinPaprika fills in, and it supplies structural fields such as supply. Where the numbers come from.

Not in the cryptocurrency ranking: an asset appears there because it passes the counting rule, never because anyone paid. Other directories the site publishes — exchanges, wallets and services — may carry paid placements where they exist, and any such row is labelled on the row itself. Nothing sponsored is left implicit.

Through the application form. It takes cryptocurrencies, tokens, exchanges, wallets and services, costs nothing, and every application is read. The rule for the project's kind decides where it lands: a coin with its own chain and consensus joins the ranking once the data finds its market; a token is listed as a token.

On X or Telegram. Name the row and the field: every reading in the pipeline is stamped with its source, so it can be traced.

The /api/v1/ tier is free, unmetered and keyless — every file is served straight from the site. Paid tiers on api.coin-spectrum.com add throughput, history and per-key limits, priced in BCH. API documentation.

Every response carries a generated_at timestamp, so a consumer can decide when to fetch again. Use the site's live feed for tickers and the API for structural fields — rank, family, supply, classification.

Use the data anywhere — a chart, a screener, an app, a paper, a commercial product. The only requirement is credit somewhere reasonable: a byline, a data-source line or a link to coin-spectrum.com.

Same data, two readers. /api/v1/assets/xrp.json is for machines and /assets/xrp/ for people; both use the same slug, so one URL can be derived from the other.

v1/ stays frozen for at least twelve months from launch. New fields land silently; renaming, removing or reshaping a field opens v2/, and v1/ keeps serving unchanged until its retirement is announced.