Aleph Zero (AZERO)
Aleph Zero ranks #224 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #1744: 1520 of the 1743 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 2025 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 61% are tokens, 32% are claims on other assets, 5% are memecoins and 1% are NFT collections.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 56/100 · provisional, C to A |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #224 |
| Rank counting claims | #1744 |
| Market capitalisation | $1M |
| Price | $0.00516 |
| Circulating supply | 266,778,951 AZERO |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | AlephBFT |
| 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)
B — 56 out of 100, provisional (from 9 of 10 sections, 10 November 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 47 to 63 (C to A).
| Section and criteria | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Consensus | 9.1 | average of 2 criteria |
| By leader (its largest chain's market cap) (Source) | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| By family (all its chains' market cap) (Source) | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Supply | 8 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 8.9 | no fixed maximum; 267 million in circulation |
| Distribution | 5.8 | average of 3 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | – | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2.6 | 74.1% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Genesis 300M AZERO, all allocated: pre-seed 50M, seed 50M, community sale 15M, pre-sale 55M, public sale 30M, Foundation 70M, team 30M. Against 405.0M current total (alephzero.org) that is 74.1%. The 10% Ecosystem Fund share of inflation is now scored separately as a block-reward cut. source |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 5.1 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 49.4% of supply sold. Pre-seed 2018 $2M at $0.04; seed 2020 $2.85M; community sale 2020 $1.05M; pre-sale 2021 $4.95M; public sale Oct 2021 $10M at $0.10; Gate.io IEO $0.1M. Total ~$21M for 200M AZERO; 200/405 = 49.4%. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.7 | Developer share: about 2.6% of today's supply received so far; 10% of each new block reward goes to them today. 10% of all inflation has gone to the Aleph Zero Foundation-run Ecosystem Fund (community treasury) since mainnet (Nov 2021), and 90% to validators and nominators. Inflation was 30M AZERO/yr, then from 14 Oct 2024 an exponentially decreasing schedule toward a 520M cap (27M in year 1). (405.0M - 300M genesis) x 10% = 10.5M, or 2.6% of 405.0M. source |
| Decentralisation | 2.3 | average of 4 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 0 | An authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: The Substrate Sudo pallet is still set on mainnet (Sudo.Key = 0x589a75...924b on 2026-10-26); a sudo key can dispatch any call, including balance changes and runtime upgrades. Its misuse caused the February 2025 stall. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: The only node, Cardinal-Cryptography/aleph-node (Apache-2.0), was developed by Cardinal Cryptography for the Aleph Zero Foundation; development has stopped pending a successor team. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 5 | Gated by stake rank: only a capped set of the largest stakes produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 4.2 | 18 active validators or block producers (source: Active) |
| Security | 4.4 | 3.5 of 8 points source |
| Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points) | 4.2 | largest 40.48%, largest three 69.17% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 0 | about 175 transactions a day |
| Hashrate (Own work 5, its power 1 kW 0 to 10 GW 5; 1 point) | 1 | not mined: another consensus, 1 |
| 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) | 6 | one client, latest version Mar 2025, within 24 months |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Scalability | — | too few measures yet 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; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | – | not yet measured |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 1 second |
| Block space per 10 minutes (24 MB or more 10: the ten busiest networks' median demand, 16.4 MB, and half again for growth) | – | not yet measured |
| Features (3 checks) | 5 | 1 of 2 passed, 1 not yet researched |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11) | ✓ | AlephBFT finalizes ~1 s blocks deterministically; the finalized head was 3 blocks (~3 s) behind the best block on 2026-10-26. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✗ | aleph-node r-15.2.0 --enable-pruning prunes state only: its CLI states "Pruning of blocks is not supported". |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | – | Finality comes from AlephBFT justifications rather than GRANDPA; a supported light client was not established. |
| 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 user-generated sr25519/ECDSA keys checked by the balances pallet, with no identity condition on transfers. |
| 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 | No shielded feature on the L1; balances are public. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | 0 | Sender and receiver accounts are public. |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | 0 | Substrate libp2p gossips transactions directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Programmability | 7.8 | 7 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | ink! (WASM) smart contracts on the Aleph Zero L1's contracts pallet, open to any account, carry PSP22 tokens; the chain still produces blocks though its maintainer stepped back in 2025, and the separate Aleph Zero EVM is an L2 that does not count. |
| Smart contracts (General-purpose) | 2 | ink! (WASM) contracts on the Aleph Zero L1's contracts pallet, open to any account; the foundation says all components to keep mainnet alive were handed over after its dispute with Cardinal Cryptography. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | pallet_multisig (threshold multisig) and pallet_vesting in the runtime, plus ink! contracts that can check block time. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | ink! 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) | ✗ | No bridge or cross-chain pallet in the runtime; Aleph Zero EVM is a separate rollup. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | PSP34 NFT contracts on ink!. |
| Demand | 4.6 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 2 | 2 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 1.6 | $70,677 traded in 24 hours; #1766 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $65,583) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.3 | 3.7% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.9 | $3,173 within 2% of the price on 2 exchanges, 0.23% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 0.3 | $1.4M, 0.3 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 | 4.8 | average of 3 criteria |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 4 | 4 full years since 2022-01-27, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities) | 1.5 | 2 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 0.5 of 6 | ✓ | 1 commit in 1 of the last 12 months (github.com/Cardinal-Cryptography/aleph-node); Last aleph-node release r-15.2.0 on 2025-03-21 and last commit 2025-04-11; the July 2025 roadmap says Cardinal Cryptography is 'stepping away as the primary chain maintainer', the Foundation is winding down and a new developer team was being sought. None had been announced as of the last update found (November 2025, handover of components to keep mainnet running). Mainnet still runs 15.2.0. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Aleph Node 15.x, mainnet Mar 2025: fixes for stuck sync and slow block producers, unit censorship resistance and improved resistance to randomness attacks. |
| Conduct (origin, claims, halts) | 9 | 2 positive, 1 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| Negative record | ||
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2025-02-12 | ✗ | Finalization stalled for about 2 h 33 min after an incorrect sudo call set an unsupported finality version, which crashed validators; deposits and withdrawals were suspended until a fix and coordinated validator upgrades restored finality (Aleph Zero post-mortem). web.archive.org |
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 Stake coins
Ethereum ETHA+
BNB BNBA
Solana SOLA+
Everscale EVER
Reef REEFB
DeFiChain DFI
ADAMANT Messenger ADMAll Proof of Stake chains →Proof of Work coins
Bitcoin BTCA+
Zcash ZECA+
Dogecoin DOGEA+
Monero XMRA+
Bitcoin Cash BCHA++
Litecoin LTCA+
Ethereum Classic ETCAAll Proof of Work chains →Supply
266,778,951 AZERO are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
Launch and allocation
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 74.1% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 49.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 2.6% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 10% |
| Nodes or validators | 18 |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
Genesis 300M AZERO, all allocated: pre-seed 50M, seed 50M, community sale 15M, pre-sale 55M, public sale 30M, Foundation 70M, team 30M. Against 405.0M current total (alephzero.org) that is 74.1%. The 10% Ecosystem Fund share of inflation is now scored separately as a block-reward cut.
Pre-seed 2018 $2M at $0.04; seed 2020 $2.85M; community sale 2020 $1.05M; pre-sale 2021 $4.95M; public sale Oct 2021 $10M at $0.10; Gate.io IEO $0.1M. Total ~$21M for 200M AZERO; 200/405 = 49.4%.
10% of all inflation has gone to the Aleph Zero Foundation-run Ecosystem Fund (community treasury) since mainnet (Nov 2021), and 90% to validators and nominators. Inflation was 30M AZERO/yr, then from 14 Oct 2024 an exponentially decreasing schedule toward a 520M cap (27M in year 1). (405.0M - 300M genesis) x 10% = 10.5M, or 2.6% of 405.0M.
The Ecosystem Fund share of past emission is estimated (10% of ~105M emitted). Sale prices and amounts differ between ICO Drops and Bitpanda for the pre-sale and public rounds.
Sources: docs.alephzero.org · alephzero.org · alephzero.org · alephzero.org · icodrops.com · alephzero.org. Researched 2026-10-26, high confidence.
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 Aleph Zero
Aleph Zero is #224 among cryptocurrencies and #1744 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 1520 places between Aleph Zero'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).