Cardano (ADA)
Cardano ranks #11 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #18: 7 of the 17 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 12 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 9 are claims on other assets and 3 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 72/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #11 |
| Rank counting claims | #18 |
| Market capitalisation | $6.5B |
| Price | $0.1726 |
| Circulating supply | 37,583,793,088 ADA |
| Maximum supply | 45,000,000,000 ADA |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Ouroboros |
| Active addresses a day | 15,683 October 2026 median, Coin Metrics |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
| Regulatory class | Commodity |
Market figures from the 10 November 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)
A — 72 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 69 to 74 (A 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 | 6.7 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 6.3 | fixed maximum supply of 45 billion |
| Distribution | 5.2 | average of 4 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | 5.9 | 15,683 addresses active a day, the median of October 2026's 31 days (Coin Metrics community data) source |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2 | 80.4% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Genesis distribution of 31,112,484,646 ADA (25,927,070,538 ADA from the voucher sale plus 5,185,414,108 ADA to IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation), against a total supply of 38,682,462,315 ADA (cardano.org supply overview, epoch 636, 2026). source |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 3.3 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 67% of supply sold. The 2015-2017 Ada voucher sale delivered 25,927,070,538 ADA at genesis; the 5.19B to IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation was not sold. 25,927.1M / 38,682.5M total supply (cardano.org supply overview, epoch 636, 2026) = 67.0%. Ada voucher sale (2015-2017) run by a Japanese corporation and its sales force, open to buyers in Japan (about 94.45% of BTC received), South Korea, China, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Gross sales were 108,844.5 BTC (commonly cited as about $62M). No venture or private token round is recorded. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.4 | Developer share: about 6.2% of today's supply received so far; 38% of each new block reward goes to them today. Since Shelley (Jul/Aug 2020) the protocol sends tau = 20% of each epoch's reward pot (monetary expansion of 0.3% of reserves plus fees) to the treasury, which DReps and the Constitutional Committee spend. Undistributed staking rewards go back to the reserves, so the treasury takes about 37-38% of the ADA actually issued (epochs 652-663: ~3.7M of ~9.7M ADA an epoch, Koios totals). Cumulatively: summing per-epoch treasury increases from epoch 209 to 663 gives 2.35B ADA, plus ~0.06B estimated inflow in the 25 withdrawal epochs, ≈ 2.41B against 38.95B supply (45B minus reserves, epoch 663) = 6.2%. source |
| Decentralisation | 5.7 | average of 3 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol party can freeze or claw back ADA; no deliberate halts. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: Input Output (IOG) employs most developers of the reference Haskell cardano-node, now hosted under Intersect MBO; Blink Labs (Dingo) and Pragma (Amaru) build alternative nodes. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 7 | Gated by stake: any holder with enough stake can validate: access bought with coins |
| Nodes (Source) | – | Not yet counted |
| Security | 8 | 6.4 of 8 points source |
| Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points) | 10 | largest 0.59%, largest three 1.54% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 7.8 | about 91,090 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) | 7.5 | cardano-node (Haskell, Input Output / Intersect, 11.1.3, Sep 2026); Dingo (Go, Blink Labs) is not yet ready for mainnet block production and Amaru (Rust, Pragma) is exploratory: one client 7, a second in development 0.5 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Scalability | 3.4 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 4.9 | typical fee $0.035 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 1.4 | about 13.5 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 4.7 | a block every 20 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) | 6 | 0.0901 MB limit, 2.7 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 0 | 0 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11) | ✗ | Ouroboros Praos gives probabilistic settlement over many 20 s slots-with-blocks; there is no fast finality or protected zero-confirmation. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✗ | cardano-node keeps the full immutable chain; Mithril snapshots speed bootstrap but still carry full history. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | Mithril stake-based certificates run as a separate signer/aggregator network beside the node, not in the consensus protocol. |
| Privacy | 7 | 7 of 10: whitepaper privacy 7 of 7, extra features 0 of 3 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) | 10 | Coins are separate unspent outputs: a payment spends whole outputs and sends the change to a new address, so the coins in one wallet need not share a history. |
| HD addresses (A new address for each payment, unlinked · Whitepaper §10) | 10 | CIP-1852 account public key (BIP32-Ed25519): wallets derive a new address for each payment without the private key |
| Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential) | 0 | No confidential transactions on mainnet (Midnight is a separate chain). |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | 0 | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | 0 | cardano-node diffuses transactions directly; no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Programmability | 8.9 | 8 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | Native assets in the ledger rules since the Mary hard fork of March 2021, mintable by anyone under a minting policy. |
| Smart contracts (General-purpose) | 2 | Plutus smart contracts on the EUTXO ledger since the Alonzo hard fork of 12 September 2021. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | Native scripts (Allegra era) combine N-of-K signatures with InvalidBefore/InvalidHereafter slot locks. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | Plutus validators can require a hash preimage and a validity interval, expressing HTLCs. |
| Native DEX (Trades the coin itself, not a claim) | ✓ | Traded as itself, not as a wrapped token or a claim: Maya Protocol; its own chain's DEXes (Cardano, DefiLlama). |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | Unique (non-fungible) native assets in the ledger since the Mary hard fork of March 2021. |
| Demand | 8.5 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 44 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 7.9 | $75,559,520 traded in 24 hours; #28 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $87,232,597) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 6.5 | 1.1% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.7 | $13,692,513 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.21% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9.5 | $6.5B, 9.5 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 7.8 | futures, options and margin positions 4.6% of its market cap |
| Wallet support (wallets that hold it, 10 or more: 10) | 10 | 16 wallets in the site's wallet directory |
| Record | 9 | average of 3 criteria |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 9 | 9 full years since 2017-10-01, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities) | 8 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 2,239 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-node); IntersectMBO/cardano-node 11.1.3, 2026-09-29; 19 stable releases in 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | cardano-node 10.5.2/10.5.3, 21 Nov 2025: fixed the delegation-certificate deserialization bug that partitioned mainnet. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Plomin hard fork, 29 Jan 2025: full on-chain governance and new Plutus V3 built-ins. |
| 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+
TRON TRXA
Hyperliquid HYPEB
NEAR Protocol NEARA
Avalanche AVAXAAll 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
37,583,793,088 of a maximum 45,000,000,000 ADA are in circulation — 83.5% of the total that will ever exist.
Launch and allocation
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 80.4% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 67% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 6.2% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 38% |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
Genesis distribution of 31,112,484,646 ADA (25,927,070,538 ADA from the voucher sale plus 5,185,414,108 ADA to IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation), against a total supply of 38,682,462,315 ADA (cardano.org supply overview, epoch 636, 2026).
Ada voucher sale (2015-2017) run by a Japanese corporation and its sales force, open to buyers in Japan (about 94.45% of BTC received), South Korea, China, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Gross sales were 108,844.5 BTC (commonly cited as about $62M). No venture or private token round is recorded.
The 2015-2017 Ada voucher sale delivered 25,927,070,538 ADA at genesis; the 5.19B to IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation was not sold. 25,927.1M / 38,682.5M total supply (cardano.org supply overview, epoch 636, 2026) = 67.0%.
Since Shelley (Jul/Aug 2020) the protocol sends tau = 20% of each epoch's reward pot (monetary expansion of 0.3% of reserves plus fees) to the treasury, which DReps and the Constitutional Committee spend. Undistributed staking rewards go back to the reserves, so the treasury takes about 37-38% of the ADA actually issued (epochs 652-663: ~3.7M of ~9.7M ADA an epoch, Koios totals). Cumulatively: summing per-epoch treasury increases from epoch 209 to 663 gives 2.35B ADA, plus ~0.06B estimated inflow in the 25 withdrawal epochs, ≈ 2.41B against 38.95B supply (45B minus reserves, epoch 663) = 6.2%.
Sources: cardano.org · cardano.org · api.koios.rest · docs.cardano.org · cardano.org · cexplorer.io. Researched 2026-10-24, high confidence.
What a regulator has said
Officially a digital commodity (SEC-CFTC, Mar 2026) AND contested — its securities status was alleged or widely disputed. Both classifications apply. Context: pre-issued at genesis via the 2017 ICO (no mining).
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 Cardano
Cardano is #11 among cryptocurrencies and #18 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 7 places between Cardano'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 1 wrapped and staked claim on Cardano →
Wallets that hold Cardano
Read on the site
- Regulatory classes of cryptocurrencies: commodity, contested, security, unclassified · blog
- What decentralisation means: seven questions, in order of importance · blog
- Which cryptocurrencies have a fixed supply? Capped and uncapped coins · journal
- Where a DEX runs, and what it actually trades · journal