ARK (ARK)
ARK ranks #101 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #606: 505 of the 605 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 609 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 50% are tokens, 41% are claims on other assets, 8% are memecoins and 1% are NFT collections.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 57/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #101 |
| Rank counting claims | #606 |
| Market capitalisation | $31M |
| Price | $0.1553 |
| Circulating supply | 200,339,964 ARK |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | DPoS (51 delegates) |
| Ledger type | Single-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 — 57 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 53 to 59 (B to B).
| 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 | 8.1 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 9 | no fixed maximum; 200 million in circulation |
| Distribution | 6.4 | average of 3 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | – | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 3.8 | 62.5% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. All 125M ARK were placed in the genesis block on 21 March 2017 (93.75M, 75%, to Token Exchange Campaign backers; the other 25% to the team and project), against a current supply of 199,950,096 ARK (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23). source |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 5.3 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 46.9% of supply sold. The Token Exchange Campaign (late 2016-Mar 2017, ~$800K in BTC and other crypto) delivered 93.75M ARK (75% of the 125M genesis) to participants in the 21 Mar 2017 genesis block. 93.75M / 199,974,118 ARK (CoinGecko, 2026-10-24) = 46.9%. Token Exchange Campaign (crowdsale) announced in November 2016, open to the public, paid in BTC and other crypto. The amount raised was not established from a primary source (aggregators report about $800K). source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No cut. The 2 ARK block reward goes entirely to the forging delegate (validator) since the March 2017 genesis. source |
| Decentralisation | 4.9 | average of 4 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level freeze of user ARK. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: ARK Ecosystem (ARK SCIC) develops ARK Core and its successor Mainsail. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 4 | Gated by election: a delegated set voted in by holders produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 5.7 | 51 active validators or block producers (source: Active) |
| Security | 6.2 | 5 of 8 points source |
| Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points) | 10 | largest 4.2%, largest three 11.4% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 0.9 | about 500 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) | 7 | one client, latest version Aug 2026 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Scalability | 4.2 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 6 | typical fee $0.016 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 1.9 | about 19 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 3.3 | a block every 8 seconds |
| 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 | 6.3 MB limit, 473 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) | ✗ | DPoS blocks every 8 s with no BFT finality; irreversibility needs many confirmations by the delegate round. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | – | No pruning mode documented for ARK Core. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | DPoS chain without finality proofs for clients; wallets rely on relay 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 | Anyone can create keys and receive and send coins; the protocol carries no identity check. |
| 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 | Transfers are public. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | 0 | Addresses are public. |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | 0 | ARK Core relays transactions peer to peer with no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Programmability | 0 | 0 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance | 0 | No token issuance on the chain itself |
| Smart contracts | 0 | ARK Core supports only fixed transaction types; the EVM-based Mainsail rewrite is not in production. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✗ | MultiSignature registration was disabled at height 35,765,000 (Core 3.11.0) and sending from or to multisig wallets at 35,872,000 (Core 3.12.0); HTLC types were never enabled on mainnet. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✗ | HTLC lock/claim/refund types exist in the code but htlcEnabled is set only on devnet, never in the mainnet milestones. |
| 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) | ✗ | Magistrate transactions (including bridgechain registration) were disabled at height 36,937,100 (Core 3.13.0, August 2026); no cross-chain messaging. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✗ | No NFT type on the live chain. |
| Demand | 5.9 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 8 | 8 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 4.5 | $934,752 traded in 24 hours; #463 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $1,693,036) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.9 | 4.8% 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 | $70,860 within 2% of the price on 3 exchanges, 0.23% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 3.7 | $31M, 3.7 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 6.3 | futures, options and margin positions 14% of its market cap |
| 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 2017-03-21, 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 | ✓ | 37 commits in 7 of the last 12 months (github.com/ArkEcosystem/core); ARK Core 3.13.0, 19 Aug 2026; three releases in the last 24 months (3.11.0, 3.12.0, 3.13.0, all 2026) after a gap from June 2024; the Mainsail successor is still in preparation. |
| 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 Stake coins
Ethereum ETHA+
BNB BNBA
Solana SOLA+
Band BANDA
Zilliqa ZILA
Geode Chain GEODE
Steem STEEMAll 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
200,339,964 ARK are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
Launch and allocation
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 62.5% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 46.9% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Nodes or validators | 51 |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
All 125M ARK were placed in the genesis block on 21 March 2017 (93.75M, 75%, to Token Exchange Campaign backers; the other 25% to the team and project), against a current supply of 199,950,096 ARK (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23).
Token Exchange Campaign (crowdsale) announced in November 2016, open to the public, paid in BTC and other crypto. The amount raised was not established from a primary source (aggregators report about $800K).
The Token Exchange Campaign (late 2016-Mar 2017, ~$800K in BTC and other crypto) delivered 93.75M ARK (75% of the 125M genesis) to participants in the 21 Mar 2017 genesis block. 93.75M / 199,974,118 ARK (CoinGecko, 2026-10-24) = 46.9%.
No cut. The 2 ARK block reward goes entirely to the forging delegate (validator) since the March 2017 genesis.
Sources: cointelegraph.com · coinbase.com · coingecko.com · ark.io · github.com · yellow.com. Researched 2026-10-24, medium 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 ARK
ARK is #101 among cryptocurrencies and #606 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 505 places between ARK'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).
See the 2 wrapped and staked claims on ARK →