NEAR Protocol (NEAR)
NEAR Protocol ranks #13 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #21: 8 of the 20 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 13 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 10 are claims on other assets and 3 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 73/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #13 |
| Rank counting claims | #21 |
| Market capitalisation | $4.7B |
| Price | $3.56 |
| Circulating supply | 1,311,344,084 NEAR |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Nightshade (Doomslug) |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
| Regulatory class | Contested |
Market figures from the 10 November 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)
A — 73 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 70 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 | 7.4 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 8.2 | no fixed maximum; 1.31 billion in circulation |
| Distribution | 6.4 | average of 3 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | – | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2.4 | 76.4% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 1,000,000,000 NEAR created at genesis on 22 April 2020, all allocated (team, backers, foundation, grants, community sale, early ecosystem), against a current total supply of 1,309,745,711 NEAR (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23). source |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 7.1 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 29.2% of supply sold. Genesis (Apr 2020) sales: backers 17.6% + small backers 6.1% (176M + 61M) and the Aug 2020 CoinList community sale ~120M = 357M NEAR; the NEAR Foundation also sold treasury tokens in the Jan 2022 $150M (Three Arrows) and Apr 2022 $350M (Tiger Global) rounds, units undisclosed (estimated ~30-50M at ~$10-15). 357M-407M / 1,309,745,711 NEAR (2026-10-23) = 27.3-31.1%, midpoint 29.2%. Prior backers came in through convertible notes and private rounds; no single backer holds more than 3.5% of the initial supply (NEAR blog). Secondary breakdowns list a pre-seed round at 2.16% and private round 2 at 8.43%. A CoinList community sale in 2020 sold about 120M NEAR (12%) in tiers at $0.29, $0.34 and $0.40. Total dollars raised were not verified here. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 9.8 | Developer share: about 2.4% of today's supply received so far; 10% of each new block reward goes to them today. Each epoch, 10% of the newly minted NEAR goes to the protocol treasury account (treasury.near). The rate is hard-coded at 1/10 for mainnet in nearcore's reward_calculator.rs, and the treasury is paid in full even when validator uptime cuts their share. The rule has applied since genesis (April 2020) and was unchanged when max inflation was halved from 5% to 2.5% on 30 Oct 2025. Net minting is 1,309.82M - 1,000M = 309.8M, plus a few million burned in fees, so the treasury has received roughly 31M, about 2.4% of supply. source |
| Decentralisation | 6.4 | average of 4 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level freeze, blacklist or halt authority over ordinary accounts. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: nearcore, the only full-node implementation, is developed by Near One under the NEAR Foundation umbrella. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 7 | Gated by stake: any holder with enough stake can validate: access bought with coins |
| Nodes (Source) | 8.7 | 397 active validators or block producers (source: Current) |
| 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 5.61%, largest three 14.15% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 10 | about 803,769 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 | 8 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.0002 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 10 | about 33,000 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 0.6 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 | 2.24 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 2240 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 10 | 3 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11) | ✓ | Doomslug blocks every ~0.6 s reach BFT finality within about two blocks, roughly 1–2 seconds. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✓ | nearcore garbage-collects data older than gc_num_epochs_to_keep (default 5 epochs); only archival nodes keep full history. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✓ | Nightshade light-client spec: block-producer approvals and Merkle proofs verified from light block headers. |
| Privacy | 2.3 | 2.3 of 10: whitepaper privacy 2.3 of 7, extra features 0 of 3 source |
| Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10) | 10 | Implicit accounts come from any ed25519 key and named accounts can be registered by anyone; nearcore 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) | 0 | Ed25519 keys under SLIP-0010 allow hardened derivation only: each new address needs the private seed, and no public key derives them |
| 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 | nearcore forwards transactions to chunk producers directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Programmability | 8.9 | 8 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | NEP-141 fungible-token contracts on its Wasm runtime, open to any account. |
| Smart contracts (General-purpose) | 2 | Wasm contracts deployable by any account on the NEAR runtime. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | Through contracts: the K-of-N multisig contract and the lockup contract, which escrows tokens until a timestamp-based schedule. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | Wasm contracts can hold funds against a hash preimage with a timeout refund (HTLC). |
| 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 (Near, DefiLlama). |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No validator-verified messaging in the protocol; bridges are separately deployed contracts. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | NEP-171 NFT contracts on the Wasm runtime. |
| Demand | 7.6 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 42 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 9.1 | $285,799,458 traded in 24 hours; #10 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $360,471,540) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.7 | 5.8% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 8.3 | $14,716,848 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.32% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 1 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9.2 | $4.7B, 9.2 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 6.2 | 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) | 6 | 6 full years since 2020-10-14, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities) | 9 | 4 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 2,697 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/near/nearcore); nearcore 2.14.0-rc.6 published 2026-10-22, with frequent stable 2.x releases through 2026. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | nearcore 2.10.7 (Mar 2026) and 2.13.4 (Sep 2026): fixed critical node crash/DoS flaws. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | 600 ms blocks with 1.2 s finality, May 2025; shards raised to 9 and automatic resharding in nearcore 2.13, 2026. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | nearcore 2.13, 2026: standardized post-quantum signature scheme for accounts. |
| 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+
Hyperliquid HYPEB
Cardano ADAA
Avalanche AVAXA
Sui SUIAAll 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
1,311,344,084 NEAR are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
Launch and allocation
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 76.4% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 29.2% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 2.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 10% |
| Nodes or validators | 397 |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
1,000,000,000 NEAR created at genesis on 22 April 2020, all allocated (team, backers, foundation, grants, community sale, early ecosystem), against a current total supply of 1,309,745,711 NEAR (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23).
Prior backers came in through convertible notes and private rounds; no single backer holds more than 3.5% of the initial supply (NEAR blog). Secondary breakdowns list a pre-seed round at 2.16% and private round 2 at 8.43%. A CoinList community sale in 2020 sold about 120M NEAR (12%) in tiers at $0.29, $0.34 and $0.40. Total dollars raised were not verified here.
Genesis (Apr 2020) sales: backers 17.6% + small backers 6.1% (176M + 61M) and the Aug 2020 CoinList community sale ~120M = 357M NEAR; the NEAR Foundation also sold treasury tokens in the Jan 2022 $150M (Three Arrows) and Apr 2022 $350M (Tiger Global) rounds, units undisclosed (estimated ~30-50M at ~$10-15). 357M-407M / 1,309,745,711 NEAR (2026-10-23) = 27.3-31.1%, midpoint 29.2%.
Each epoch, 10% of the newly minted NEAR goes to the protocol treasury account (treasury.near). The rate is hard-coded at 1/10 for mainnet in nearcore's reward_calculator.rs, and the treasury is paid in full even when validator uptime cuts their share. The rule has applied since genesis (April 2020) and was unchanged when max inflation was halved from 5% to 2.5% on 30 Oct 2025. Net minting is 1,309.82M - 1,000M = 309.8M, plus a few million burned in fees, so the treasury has received roughly 31M, about 2.4% of supply.
Sources: near.org · research.coinone.co.kr · betoken.substack.com · github.com · nomicon.io · blog.nearone.org. Researched 2026-10-24, low confidence.
What a regulator has said
Alleged an unregistered security by the SEC (2023 complaint); not named a commodity in 2026 and not adjudicated — status unsettled.
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 NEAR Protocol
NEAR Protocol is #13 among cryptocurrencies and #21 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 8 places between NEAR Protocol'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 3 wrapped and staked claims on NEAR Protocol →