Hive (HIVE)
Hive ranks #108 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #729: 621 of the 728 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 743 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 53% are tokens, 37% are claims on other assets, 9% are memecoins and 1% are NFT collections.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | pending — launch under review |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #108 |
| Rank counting claims | #729 |
| Market capitalisation | $23M |
| Price | $0.0425 |
| Circulating supply | 550,140,465 HIVE |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | DPoS (witnesses) |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
Market figures from the 10 November 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)
Grade pending. Hive's launch — how much went to insiders, whether it was sold to investors — is still being researched. A grade is not given until it is, so that a coin is never rated higher for what is not yet known.
| 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 | 7.7 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 8.6 | no fixed maximum; 550 million in circulation |
| Distribution | 9.8 | average of 2 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | – | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | – | Not established: Hive (fork, 20 Mar 2020) started with a replicated snapshot of Steem balances, so it carries Steem's history, including the ninjamine. The ninjamined Steemit stake and accounts that backed it were excluded, and their balances were moved to the steem.dao fund (now @hive.fund); one anti-Hive source puts that at 83.2M, which is unverified. Current supply is about 550M. |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 10 | No sale of the coin source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.6 | Developer share: about 3.7% of today's supply received so far; 10% of each new block reward goes to them today. Since HF21 (Aug 2019 on Steem, inherited by Hive in March 2020), 10% of new issuance goes to the Decentralized Hive Fund (hive.fund), a stake-voted treasury. The rest goes 65% to content rewards, 15% to HP stakers and 10% to witnesses. Projected issuance from Aug 2019 to Oct 2026 is ~11.1M + 168.9M + 22.3M = ~202M HIVE, of which 10% is ~20M, about 3.7% of ~550M HIVE. DHF HIVE is converted to HBD, so this is approximate. source |
| Decentralisation | 4.7 | average of 3 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 0 | An authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: At Hive's launch (hard fork 23, 2020) the witnesses withheld or moved the balances of about 300 Steem accounts (Steemit Inc. and those judged complicit in the takeover) into the decentralised fund, so the witness set can claw back users' coins. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: hived (MIT) is developed by several independent teams (BlockTrades the largest), and hard forks need approval from 17 of the 21 elected witnesses. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 4 | Gated by election: a delegated set voted in by holders produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | – | Not yet counted |
| Security | 8.5 | 6.8 of 8 points source |
| Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points) | 10 | largest 4.8%, largest three 14.3% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 10 | about 558,000 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 Oct 2026 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Scalability | 6.4 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 4.8 | about 109 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 1.7 | a block every 3 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) | 8.9 | 0.0655 MB limit, 13.1 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11) | ✓ | Since hard fork 26 (2022), one-block irreversibility makes a 3-second block irreversible as soon as a supermajority of witnesses has signed it, typically within a block or two. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✓ | hived 1.27.x block-log-split option: lowering it keeps only the newest block-log parts, and 0 keeps no raw blocks (pruned mode). |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | No header-proof light client; apps query API nodes. |
| 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 by an existing account paying the creation fee or a claimed ticket; hived 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 | Account names are public. |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | 0 | hived p2p gossip with no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Programmability | 2.2 | 2 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (Through a metaprotocol) | 1 | Hive Engine tokens: read by indexers, not validated by the chain's nodes |
| Smart contracts | 0 | Fixed Graphene operations only; Hive Engine is a sidechain built on custom_json that Hive nodes do not validate. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✗ | Weighted owner/active authorities with weight_threshold give native multisig, but there is no user time lock: escrow needs an agent and savings carry a fixed three-day withdrawal delay. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✗ | No hash-lock operation exists. |
| Native DEX (Trades the coin itself, not a claim) | ✓ | Traded as itself, not as a wrapped token or a claim: an exchange in its own protocol (The internal market (limit_order_create matched against open orders) for HIVE and HBD is part of the protocol). |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No cross-chain feature in the protocol. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✗ | No token or NFT type in the protocol. |
| Demand | 5.7 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 7 | 7 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 3.5 | $196,353 traded in 24 hours; #843 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $590,348) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 8.1 | 2.2% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 9.4 | $152,593 within 2% of the price on 4 exchanges, 0.65% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 3.4 | $23M, 3.4 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 7.2 | futures, options and margin positions 7.9% 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 | 9 | average of 3 criteria |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 10 | 10 full years since genesis. Split from Steem on 20 March 2020, keeping Steem's ledger: its history runs from Steem's launch on 24 March 2016. |
| Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities) | 7 | 2 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 3,107 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/openhive-network/hive); hived 1.28.8 released 2026-10-05. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Hardfork 28 (hived 1.28.0), activated 19 Nov 2025: several recurrent transfers per sender/receiver pair, mixed authority levels in one transaction, unlimited vote edits. |
| 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+
Somnia SOMIA
Terra LUNAA
Flux FLUXA
Osmosis OSMOAAll 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
550,140,465 HIVE are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
Launch and allocation
| Developer share received since launch | 3.7% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Developer share of new coins today | 10% |
| Fundraising | No sale and no investor round |
Not established: Hive (fork, 20 Mar 2020) started with a replicated snapshot of Steem balances, so it carries Steem's history, including the ninjamine. The ninjamined Steemit stake and accounts that backed it were excluded, and their balances were moved to the steem.dao fund (now @hive.fund); one anti-Hive source puts that at 83.2M, which is unverified. Current supply is about 550M.
No sale or investor round; Hive was distributed as a 1:1 airdrop of Steem balances.
Since HF21 (Aug 2019 on Steem, inherited by Hive in March 2020), 10% of new issuance goes to the Decentralized Hive Fund (hive.fund), a stake-voted treasury. The rest goes 65% to content rewards, 15% to HP stakers and 10% to witnesses. Projected issuance from Aug 2019 to Oct 2026 is ~11.1M + 168.9M + 22.3M = ~202M HIVE, of which 10% is ~20M, about 3.7% of ~550M HIVE. DHF HIVE is converted to HBD, so this is approximate.
Sources: developers.hive.io · hive.io · coinbureau.com · hive.blog · steemit.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 Hive
Hive is #108 among cryptocurrencies and #729 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 621 places between Hive'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).