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Karlsen (KLS)

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Karlsen ranks #286 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #2765: 2479 of the 2764 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 3071 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 62% are tokens, 34% are claims on other assets, 3% are memecoins and 1% are NFT collections.

CoinSpectrum Grade	A · 70/100 · provisional, B to A
Rank among cryptocurrencies	#286
Rank counting claims	#2765
Market capitalisation	$160,237
Price	$0.0000529
Circulating supply	3,029,682,796 KLS
Maximum supply	4,961,000,000 KLS
Consensus family	Proof of Work
Consensus mechanism	KarlsenHashV2 (FishHash)
Own hashrate	15 GH/s
Network purpose	Payments
Ledger type	Single-asset ledger
Launch distribution	No premine

Market figures from the 10 November 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.

CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)

A — 70 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 57 to 71 (B to A).

Section and criteria	Score	Basis
Consensus	10	average of 2 criteria
By leader (its largest chain's market cap) (Source)	10	Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap
By family (all its chains' market cap) (Source)	10	Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains
Supply	7.8	the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds
Supply (21 million scores 10)	7.6	fixed maximum supply of 4.96 billion
Distribution	10	average of 3 parts
Holder concentration (Source)	–	Not yet measured
Active addresses	–	Not yet measured
Premine (allocated at launch)	10	0% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. Genesis carries an empty UTXO commitment (EMPTY_MUHASH) and the coinbase code has no developer output, so everything is mined from block one; listing sites and the project describe no premine and no ICO. source
Fundraising (share sold) (Source)	10	No sale of the coin source
Developer share (after launch)	10	No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. Coinbase pays the block subsidy and fees to miners only; no developer fund in rusty-karlsen's coinbase code. source
Decentralisation	10	average of 3 parts
Governance (Source)	10	No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level party can freeze, blacklist or claw back coins or halt the chain. source
No central team (Source)	10	No central team: The volunteer Karlsen Network team maintains rusty-karlsen (ISC) and the Go karlsend, both forks of Kaspa; no company controls it. source
Who can mint (Source)	10	Open to anyone with hardware: anyone can produce blocks by mining, no permission needed
Nodes (Source)	–	Not yet counted
Security	8.8	3.5 of 4 points, 4 not yet measured source
Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points)	–
Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points)	–
Hashrate (Own work 5, its power 1 kW 0 to 10 GW 5; 1 point)	6.3	own work 5; about 71.6 kW, 1.3 of 5; the largest on its algorithm
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)	9	rusty-karlsen (Rust, v3.1.0, Feb 2026) and karlsend (Go, v2.3.0, Feb 2026), forks of Kaspa's two separate clients: separate code, the same Karlsen team
Open source (Node software)	✓
No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years)	✓
Scalability	5.9	average of 5 parts source
Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0)	10	typical fee $1e-9
Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5)	6.2	about 250 simple transactions a second
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)	10	0.5 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 300 MB per 10 minutes
Features (3 checks)	3.3	1 of 3 passed
Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11)	✗	One block a second, but GHOSTDAG confirmation is probabilistic and rusty-karlsen's mempool implements replace-by-fee (RbfPolicy), so fast blocks alone do not qualify.
Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7)	✓	Pruning is built into the Kaspa-derived node: it keeps only data above the pruning point by default.
Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8)	✗	No SPV-style light client in the Kaspa/Karlsen node; wallets trust a node.
Privacy	7	7 of 10: whitepaper privacy 7 of 7, extra features 0 of 3, 1 not yet researched source
Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10)	10	Addresses are hashes of keys users generate themselves; the node checks scripts and signatures, with no identity condition in its consensus rules.
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)	–
Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential)	0	Transparent transactions: amounts are public on chain.
Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden)	0	Transparent addresses: sender and receiver are public on chain.
Network privacy (Origin hidden by default)	0	rusty-karlsen (Kaspa fork) relays transactions without origin hiding.
Programmability	3.3	3 of 9 points source
Token issuance	0	No token issuance on the chain itself
Smart contracts (Scripting for spending conditions)	1	Kaspa-derived txscript limited to spending conditions; the KIP-10 introspection upgrade (crescendo_activation) is unscheduled on Karlsen mainnet.
Multisig and time locks (Without a third party)	✓	OpCheckMultiSig, OpCheckLockTimeVerify and OpCheckSequenceVerify in rusty-karlsen txscript.
Atomic swaps (With other chains)	✓	HTLCs expressible with hash opcodes and OpCheckLockTimeVerify in txscript.
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 protocol-level cross-chain messaging.
NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules)	✗	No token or NFT type in the consensus rules.
Demand	2.4	average of 6 measures
Exchanges (10 or more: 10)	1	1 exchange
Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10)	0	$309 traded in 24 hours; #3615 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 15, $396)
Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10)	2.2	0.17% of its market cap a day, median of the last 16 days
Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10)	–	no order book on the nine exchanges read
Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10)	0	$160K, 0 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	4.7	average of 3 criteria
Age (years since genesis) (Source)	2	2 full years since 2023-12-12, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated).
Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities)	2	1 positive, 0 negative source
Positive
Steady work, 2 of 6	✓	15 commits in 1 of the last 12 months (github.com/karlsen-network/rusty-karlsen); rusty-karlsen v3.1.0 (2026-02-13) and v3.0.0-pre (2025-05-13) are the only reference-client releases in the last 24 months (Go karlsend v2.3.0, 2026-02-12); last commit February 2026.
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 Work coins

Proof of Stake coins

Supply

3,029,682,796 of a maximum 4,961,000,000 KLS are in circulation — 61.1% of the total that will ever exist.

Launch and allocation

Premine (allocated at launch)	0% of today's supply
Sold by the issuer or insiders	0% of today's supply
Developer share received since launch	0% of today's supply
Developer share of new coins today	0%
Fundraising	No sale and no investor round

Genesis carries an empty UTXO commitment (EMPTY_MUHASH) and the coinbase code has no developer output, so everything is mined from block one; listing sites and the project describe no premine and no ICO.

No ICO or presale found.

No sale documented.

Coinbase pays the block subsidy and fees to miners only; no developer fund in rusty-karlsen's coinbase code.

Mainnet started around November 2023 (back-calculated from the DAA score of the September 2024 hard fork). The table's total, 4.961B KLS, matches the input max. The inflation figure assumes the DAA score has tracked wall-clock time at 1 BPS; the 10-BPS 'crescendo' upgrade is not activated on mainnet. With all Karlsen web infrastructure unreachable, the network's current state could not be checked.

Sources: github.com · github.com · github.com · github.com · github.com. Researched 2026-10-26, medium confidence.

The work behind it

Karlsen is secured by 15 GH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.

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 Karlsen

Karlsen is #286 among cryptocurrencies and #2765 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 2479 places between Karlsen'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).