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Æternity (AE)

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Æternity ranks #220 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #1724: 1504 of the 1723 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 2007 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 61% are tokens, 33% are claims on other assets, 5% are memecoins and 1% are NFT collections.

CoinSpectrum Grade	A · 66/100 · provisional, B to A
Rank among cryptocurrencies	#220
Rank counting claims	#1724
Market capitalisation	$1M · a day's trading is 0.008% of it: a quoted figure, not one holders could sell into
Price	$0.00370
Circulating supply	385,106,898 AE
Maximum supply	536,306,702 AE
Consensus family	Proof of Work
Consensus mechanism	Cuckoo Cycle
Own hashrate	2.10 kH/s
Network purpose	Smart-contract platform
Ledger type	Multi-asset ledger
Launch distribution	Presale

Market figures from the 10 November 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.

CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)

A — 66 out of 100, provisional (from 10 of 10 sections, 10 November 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 61 to 70 (B to A).

Section and criteria	Score	Basis
Consensus	10	average of 2 criteria
By leader (its largest chain's market cap) (Source)	10	Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap
By family (all its chains' market cap) (Source)	10	Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains
Supply	8.7	the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds
Supply (21 million scores 10)	8.6	fixed maximum supply of 536 million
Distribution	6.1	average of 3 parts
Holder concentration (Source)	–	Not yet measured
Active addresses	–	Not yet measured
Premine (allocated at launch)	3.8	61.7% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. The entire ERC-20 supply, 273,685,830 AE (Etherscan max total supply), was allocated before mainnet: 82% to sale contributors, 17% to founders, company and foundation, 1% airdrop. It migrated into the mainnet genesis and later hard forks. Against the current total of 443.44M (aeternity middleware, 2026-10-23), that is 61.7%. This is a lower bound: the 2019 Block Reward Initiative redirected a share of mining rewards to the æternity Crypto Foundation (dev_reward), not summed here. source
Fundraising (share sold) (Source)	4.9	Sold by its issuer or insiders: 50.6% of supply sold. Contribution campaign 2017. Phase 1 (Apr 3-6): 120,827 ETH + 328.6 BTC at 1,000 AE/ETH. Phase 2 (from May 29): cap CHF 21M at 650-750 AE/ETH. Contributors hold 82% x 273.7M = 224.4M; 224.4 / 443.4 = 50.6%. source
Developer share (after launch)	9.7	Developer share: about 2.7% of today's supply received so far; no share of new block rewards today. Block Reward Initiative: 10.9% (109/1000 shares) of each key block's coinbase went to the æternity Crypto Foundation from the Fortuna fork (block 90,800, Apr 2019) through Iris; it ended at Ceres (block 941,700, 2024). Coinbase over blocks 90,800-941,699 = 110.70M AE (aec_coinbase) × 10.9% = 12.07M AE = 2.7% of 443.45M (middleware total_token_supply). Today the coinbase goes wholly to miners. source
Decentralisation	6.7	average of 3 parts
Governance (Source)	10	No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol key can freeze or claw back AE; after the 2020-21 51% attacks the foundation asked exchanges to lock stolen funds, an off-chain action. Nodes reject gossiped forks more than 5 blocks below the top by default (fork resistance), which is not a party's halt power. source
No central team (Source)	0	A central team directs it: The only node (aeternity/aeternity, ISC licence) and the protocol roadmap (hard forks, hyperchains) are run by the Aeternity Foundation / aeternity Crypto Foundation and its funded core team. source
Who can mint (Source)	10	Open to anyone with hardware: anyone can produce blocks by mining, no permission needed
Nodes (Source)	–	Not yet counted
Security	6.1	4.9 of 8 points source
Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points)	0	largest 75.85%, largest three 99.85%
Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points)	7.9	about 99,906 transactions a day
Hashrate (Own work 5, its power 1 kW 0 to 10 GW 5; 1 point)	6.2	own work 5; about 54 kW (estimated from its miner pay), 1.2 of 5; the largest on its algorithm
Clients (Separate code and teams 10, separate code or teams 9, a fork by the same team or a stale second 8; one client: a new version within 12 months 7, 24 months 6, none in 24 months 5, none in 48 months 3; a second in development +0.5, a second seen running +1, 8 at most with one client; chain ended 0; 1 point)	7	one client, latest version Sep 2026
Open source (Node software)	✓
No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years)	✓
Scalability	6.6	average of 5 parts source
Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0)	10	typical fee $1.1e-7
Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5)	4.8	about 107 simple transactions a second
Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side)	8.1	a block every 3 minutes
Block space per 10 minutes (24 MB or more 10: the ten busiest networks' median demand, 16.4 MB, and half again for growth)	10	18 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 59.9 MB per 10 minutes
Features (3 checks)	0	0 of 2 passed, 1 not yet researched
Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11)	✗	Bitcoin-NG: microblocks every ~3 s are signed by the current leader but can be dropped by the next key block; settlement relies on 3-minute PoW key blocks with probabilistic confirmation.
Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7)	–	State garbage collection exists, but whether nodes can drop old blocks was not established.
Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8)	✗	No light-client protocol; SDKs trust node APIs.
Privacy	3.5	3.5 of 10: whitepaper privacy 3.5 of 7, extra features 0 of 3, 1 not yet researched source
Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10)	10	Accounts are created from keys users generate themselves; transfers are validated by signature, with no identity condition in the protocol.
UTXO ledger (Separate outputs, change to a new address · Whitepaper §2, §9)	0	An account ledger: one running balance for each address, so the remainder stays at the sending address and its payments share one public history.
HD addresses (A new address for each payment, unlinked · Whitepaper §10)	–
Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential)	0	Balances and transfers are public.
Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden)	0	Sender and receiver accounts are public.
Network privacy (Origin hidden by default)	0	aeternity node gossips transactions directly; no Dandelion or Tor.
Programmability	7.8	7 of 9 points source
Token issuance (At protocol level)	2	Sophia smart contracts on its FATE VM, open to any account, carry AEX-9 fungible tokens.
Smart contracts (General-purpose)	2	Sophia contracts on the FATE VM, open to any account, plus generalized accounts, state channels and oracles in the protocol.
Multisig and time locks (Without a third party)	✓	Generalized accounts attach a contract that authorises transactions (multi-signature schemes named in the docs), and Sophia contracts can check block height and time.
Atomic swaps (With other chains)	✓	Sophia contracts can express hash-locked, time-locked escrow.
Native DEX (Trades the coin itself, not a claim)	✗	No DEX found trading the coin itself: none on its own chain (DefiLlama), and not on THORChain, Maya, Chainflip, Komodo DeFi, BasicSwap, Bisq or Haveno (checked 2026-11-04).
Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself)	✗	The ÆRC bridge to Ethereum is a separate service, and Hyperchains anchor child chains to a parent rather than verifying messages from other chains on the æternity mainnet.
NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules)	✓	AEX-141 NFT contracts on FATE.
Demand	2.2	average of 7 measures
Exchanges (10 or more: 10)	1	1 exchange
Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10)	0	$114 traded in 24 hours; #3471 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $698)
Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10)	0	0.03% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days
Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10)	3.1	$124 within 2% of the price on 1 exchange, 0.01% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days
Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10)	0.4	$1.4M, 0.4 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold
Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0)	10	no futures, options or margin on the exchanges read
Wallet support (wallets that hold it, 10 or more: 10)	1	its own node and wallet, counted as 1: no wallet in the site's directory lists it yet
Record	8.3	average of 3 criteria
Age (years since genesis) (Source)	9	9 full years since 2017-05-29, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated).
Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities)	6	1 positive, 0 negative source
Positive
Steady work, 6 of 6	✓	213 commits in 5 of the last 12 months (github.com/aeternity/aeternity); Reference node aeternity/aeternity v7.3.0 released 2026-09-06 (v7.2.1 March 2026, v7.2.2 July 2026).
Conduct (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	✓

Ten sections, weighted equally, each 0 to 10: consensus (the two ladders), supply (the supply scale and a fixed cap that holds), distribution (premine, fundraising, developer share, holders), decentralisation (governance, no central team, who can mint, nodes), security, scalability, privacy, programmability (what the scripting layer can do beyond the whitepaper's payment system), demand, and record (age, development, conduct). They are built from the criteria in the second table: privacy, scalability, security and decentralisation are the Cryptocurrency Standards among them, as follows: privacy (the whitepaper's three checks a base of 7 of 10, three extra features up to 3 more), scalability (four measures and three features), security (pool diversity, network activity, hashrate, clients and two checks) and decentralisation (governance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share); programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) follows them, and supply and demand are two: the supply, scored against 21 million, and demand, the average of seven measures of the market and the wallets. Provisional: parts 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.

Proof of Work coins

Proof of Stake coins

Supply

385,106,898 of a maximum 536,306,702 AE are in circulation — 71.8% of the total that will ever exist.

Launch and allocation

Premine (allocated at launch)	61.7% of today's supply
Sold by the issuer or insiders	50.6% of today's supply
Developer share received since launch	2.7% of today's supply
Developer share of new coins today	0%
Fundraising	Public sale

The entire ERC-20 supply, 273,685,830 AE (Etherscan max total supply), was allocated before mainnet: 82% to sale contributors, 17% to founders, company and foundation, 1% airdrop. It migrated into the mainnet genesis and later hard forks. Against the current total of 443.44M (aeternity middleware, 2026-10-23), that is 61.7%. This is a lower bound: the 2019 Block Reward Initiative redirected a share of mining rewards to the æternity Crypto Foundation (dev_reward), not summed here.

Contribution campaign 2017. Phase 1 (Apr 3-6): 120,827 ETH + 328.6 BTC at 1,000 AE/ETH. Phase 2 (from May 29): cap CHF 21M at 650-750 AE/ETH. Contributors hold 82% x 273.7M = 224.4M; 224.4 / 443.4 = 50.6%.

Block Reward Initiative: 10.9% (109/1000 shares) of each key block's coinbase went to the æternity Crypto Foundation from the Fortuna fork (block 90,800, Apr 2019) through Iris; it ended at Ceres (block 941,700, 2024). Coinbase over blocks 90,800-941,699 = 110.70M AE (aec_coinbase) × 10.9% = 12.07M AE = 2.7% of 443.45M (middleware total_token_supply). Today the coinbase goes wholly to miners.

The 82/17/1 split is from the phase-1 FAQ and is assumed to hold after phase 2. Phase 2's final raise is not established. The cumulative BRI dev reward would raise preminePct by a few points.

Sources: github.com · github.com · blog.aeternity.com · etherscan.io · mainnet.aeternity.io · blog.aeternity.com. Researched 2026-10-24, high confidence.

The work behind it

Æternity is secured by 2.10 kH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.

What a regulator has said

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.

How CoinSpectrum ranks Æternity

Æternity is #220 among cryptocurrencies and #1724 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 1504 places between Æternity'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).