Kaia (KAIA)
Kaia ranks #50 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #157: 107 of the 156 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 152 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 56% are claims on other assets, 37% are tokens, 7% are memecoins and 1% are NFT collections.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 65/100 · provisional, B to A |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #50 |
| Rank counting claims | #157 |
| Market capitalisation | $204M |
| Price | $0.0317 |
| Circulating supply | 6,463,921,388 KAIA |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Istanbul BFT (PoS) |
| 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 — 65 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 | 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 | 6.8 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 7.5 | no fixed maximum; 6.46 billion in circulation |
| Distribution | 4.2 | average of 3 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | – | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0 | 100% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Klaytn created 10B KLAY at genesis (2019) for Kakao/Ground X allocations. After later burns (incl. the 5.30B KIP-103 burn), that genesis allocation alone still exceeds today's ~6.45B supply (CoinGecko total 6,449,710,644, 2026-10-24), so 100. The ecosystem and infrastructure fund shares of block rewards are scored separately as a block-reward cut. source |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 4.4 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 55.8% of supply sold. Ground X's private KLAY sales (Dec 2018 at $0.03, ~$90M; Apr 2019 at $0.08) make up the 36% private-sale bucket of the 10B genesis = ~3.6B KLAY, carried 1:1 into KAIA (Dec 2018 round alone ≈ 3.0B). 3.6B / 6,449,965,814 KAIA (CoinGecko total, 2026-10-24) = 55.8%. Any LINE sales of LINK/FNSA before the 2024 swap are not established and are excluded. Ground X (Kakao) raised ~$90M in a private token sale (Oct-Dec 2018) from IDG Capital, Crescendo Equity Partners, Translink Capital and others, with a further round of similar size planned from March 2019; no public sale. Finschia (LINE) FNSA was swapped in at the 2024 merger. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 8.2 | Developer share: about 18.3% of today's supply received so far; 50% of each new block reward goes to them today. Klaytn minted 9.6 KLAY/block from Jun 2019 with 54% to the Klaytn Growth Fund and 12% to the Klaytn Improvement Reserve. KGP-3 (Nov 2022) cut this to 6.4 KLAY with 40% KGF and 10% KIR. Since the Aug 2024 Kaia merger it is 9.6 KAIA/block, of which 25% goes to the Kaia Ecosystem Fund and 25% to the Kaia Infrastructure Fund; GC validators get the other 50%. At ~31.5M blocks/yr: 0.66 x 1,026M + 0.5 x 361M + 0.5 x 651M = ~1,183M, which is 18.3% of 6,449.7M. This is gross issuance: KIP-103 and KIP-160 later burned much of the fund balances, so the cut still held today is smaller. source |
| Decentralisation | 5 | average of 3 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level freeze of user KAIA is documented; validators are a permissioned Governance Council. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: The Kaia DLT Foundation maintains the only client, kaiachain/kaia (LGPL-3.0), and admits Governance Council members. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 5 | Gated by stake rank: only a capped set of the largest stakes produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | – | Not yet counted |
| Security | 8.1 | 6.5 of 8 points source |
| Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points) | 10 | largest 6%, largest three 16.6% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 8.4 | about 145,636 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 Mar 2026 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Scalability | 4.4 | average of 3 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.00002 |
| 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) | 3.3 | 1 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11) | ✓ | Istanbul BFT gives immediate deterministic finality with 1-second blocks. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✗ | --state.live-pruning prunes old state tries, but nodes keep every block. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | No light-client protocol; wallets trust RPC servers. |
| 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 | Any secp256k1 key can hold and send KAIA; the chain's account and transfer rules carry 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 | No confidential transactions. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | 0 | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | 0 | Kaia nodes relay transactions directly. |
| Programmability | 8.9 | 8 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | KIP-7 (ERC-20 compatible) contracts on its EVM, open to any account. |
| Smart contracts (General-purpose) | 2 | An EVM open to any account, with DEX and lending applications on mainnet. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | Native AccountKeyWeightedMultiSig (weighted keys against a threshold) plus timelock contracts. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | EVM HTLC contracts (hash lock plus timelock refund). |
| Native DEX (Trades the coin itself, not a claim) | ✓ | Traded as itself, not as a wrapped token or a claim: its own chain's DEXes (Kaia, DefiLlama). |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains; bridges are third-party. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | KIP-17 (ERC-721 compatible) contracts on the EVM. |
| Demand | 6.7 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 35 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 5.5 | $4,580,767 traded in 24 hours; #198 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $5,649,356) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 8.4 | 2.5% 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 | $481,899 within 2% of the price on 7 exchanges, 0.24% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 5.8 | $204M, 5.8 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 8.5 | futures, options and margin positions 2.2% 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 | average of 3 criteria |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 7 | 7 full years since 2019-10-29, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities) | 7 | 2 positive, 0 negative, 2 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 1,586 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/kaiachain/kaia); kaia v2.2.2, 10 Mar 2026; 8 releases in the last 24 months. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Prague hardfork (v2.0.2), 17 Jul 2025 at block 190,670,000: EIP-7702 and gas abstraction. |
| Not yet researched | ||
| Shipped a security fix in two years | – | |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years | – | |
| 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+
Plasma XPLA
Terra Luna Classic LUNCA
THORChain RUNEB
Monad MONAAll 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
6,463,921,388 KAIA are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
Launch and allocation
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 100% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 55.8% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 18.3% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 50% |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
Klaytn created 10B KLAY at genesis (2019) for Kakao/Ground X allocations. After later burns (incl. the 5.30B KIP-103 burn), that genesis allocation alone still exceeds today's ~6.45B supply (CoinGecko total 6,449,710,644, 2026-10-24), so 100. The ecosystem and infrastructure fund shares of block rewards are scored separately as a block-reward cut.
Ground X (Kakao) raised ~$90M in a private token sale (Oct-Dec 2018) from IDG Capital, Crescendo Equity Partners, Translink Capital and others, with a further round of similar size planned from March 2019; no public sale. Finschia (LINE) FNSA was swapped in at the 2024 merger.
Ground X's private KLAY sales (Dec 2018 at $0.03, ~$90M; Apr 2019 at $0.08) make up the 36% private-sale bucket of the 10B genesis = ~3.6B KLAY, carried 1:1 into KAIA (Dec 2018 round alone ≈ 3.0B). 3.6B / 6,449,965,814 KAIA (CoinGecko total, 2026-10-24) = 55.8%. Any LINE sales of LINK/FNSA before the 2024 swap are not established and are excluded.
Klaytn minted 9.6 KLAY/block from Jun 2019 with 54% to the Klaytn Growth Fund and 12% to the Klaytn Improvement Reserve. KGP-3 (Nov 2022) cut this to 6.4 KLAY with 40% KGF and 10% KIR. Since the Aug 2024 Kaia merger it is 9.6 KAIA/block, of which 25% goes to the Kaia Ecosystem Fund and 25% to the Kaia Infrastructure Fund; GC validators get the other 50%. At ~31.5M blocks/yr: 0.66 x 1,026M + 0.5 x 361M + 0.5 x 651M = ~1,183M, which is 18.3% of 6,449.7M. This is gross issuance: KIP-103 and KIP-160 later burned much of the fund balances, so the cut still held today is smaller.
Sources: coincodex.com · btc-echo.de · coingecko.com · docs.kaia.io · govforum.kaia.io · govforum.kaia.io. Researched 2026-10-24, low 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 Kaia
Kaia is #50 among cryptocurrencies and #157 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 107 places between Kaia'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).