☰ Menu

Primecoin (XPM)

XPM price chart

Primecoin ranks #236 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #1856: 1620 of the 1855 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 2137 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 61% are tokens, 33% are claims on other assets, 5% are memecoins and 1% are NFT collections.

CoinSpectrum Grade	pending — no market data
Rank among cryptocurrencies	#236
Rank counting claims	#1856
Market capitalisation	$1M
Price	$0.0183
Circulating supply	59,973,511 XPM
Maximum supply	no fixed cap
Consensus family	Proof of Work
Consensus mechanism	Prime-chain (Cunningham chains)
Own hashrate	—
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)

Grade pending. No market cap or no daily volume is reported for Primecoin by any source the site reads. 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	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	8.6	the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds
Supply (21 million scores 10)	9.5	no fixed maximum; 60 million in circulation
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. Launched 7 July 2013 by Sunny King with no genesis allocation; every block reward follows TargetGetMint (999 / difficulty^2 XPM) from block one. 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. The protocol pays the whole mint to the block finder. The 1% 'donation' in mikaelh's high-performance miner is an optional client-side setting, not a protocol cut. source
Decentralisation	10	average of 3 parts
Governance (Source)	10	No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level freeze or checkpoint key; plain proof of work. source
No central team (Source)	10	No central team: Volunteer maintainers in the primecoin GitHub organisation since founder Sunny King stepped away; MIT licence. 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	3.3	2.3 of 7 points, 1 not yet measured source
Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points)	0	largest 98.4%, largest three 99.8%
Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points)	0.1	about 272 transactions a day
Hashrate (Own work 5, its power 1 kW 0 to 10 GW 5; 1 point)	–
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)	3	one client, no new version in 48 months (latest May 2022)
Open source (Node software)	✓
No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years)	✓
Scalability	6.5	average of 5 parts source
Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0)	10	typical fee $0.00048
Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5)	4.2	about 74 simple transactions a second
Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side)	6.4	a block every 1 minute
Block space per 10 minutes (24 MB or more 10: the ten busiest networks' median demand, 16.4 MB, and half again for growth)	8.4	1 MB limit, 10 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)	✗	Most reachable nodes run Primecoin 0.2.0 on a Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 base, which accepts BIP125 opt-in replace-by-fee; no instant locks; 60 s blocks.
Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7)	✗	Primecoin v0.1.5 (Bitcoin 0.8 base) has no -prune option.
Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8)	✓	Bitcoin 0.8-based node serves BIP37 merkleblocks for SPV.
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 UTXO amounts; no confidential-transaction or shielded feature.
Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden)	0	Transparent addresses; no ring signatures, ZK proofs or stealth addresses.
Network privacy (Origin hidden by default)	0	Bitcoin-derived node relays its own transactions over clearnet by default; Tor (-proxy/-onion) needs user setup and there is no Dandelion.
Programmability	1.1	1 of 9 points source
Token issuance	0	No token issuance on the chain itself
Smart contracts (Scripting for spending conditions)	1	Bitcoin 0.8-era Script (src/script.cpp) with spending conditions only.
Multisig and time locks (Without a third party)	✗	OP_CHECKMULTISIG is present, but OP_NOP2/OP_NOP3 stay no-ops (no CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY or CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY) in the current master, so outputs cannot carry time-locked spending conditions.
Atomic swaps (With other chains)	✗	Without CLTV/CSV no script refund path can be time-locked, so an HTLC cannot be expressed in an output.
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 cross-chain feature in the protocol.
NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules)	✗	No token or NFT type in the protocol.
Demand	0.4	average of 3 measures
Exchanges (10 or more: 10)	0	no exchange the site reads trades it
Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10)	–	no volume reported
Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10)	–	not measured
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)	0.1	$1.1M, 0.1 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold
Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0)	–	not measured
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	6.8	average of 3 criteria
Age (years since genesis) (Source)	10	13 full years since 2013-07-11, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated).
Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities)	0.5	1 positive, 2 negative source
Positive
Steady work, 2.5 of 6	✓	10 commits in 5 of the last 12 months (github.com/primecoin/primecoin); Last tagged release v0.2.0xpm-test-rc9 (2022-05-17); no release in the last 24 months, though commits continued on master into February 2026.
Negative
Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-07-03, −1	✗	CVE-2020-14198: misbehaving peers are auto-banned into an unbounded ban list, so many attacker addresses (cheap with IPv6) can exhaust memory; still in Primecoin v0.1.5xpm. bitcoincore.org github.com
Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-07-31, −1	✗	CVE-2024-52919: addr-message spam can overflow the address manager's 32-bit id counter and crash the node, with no addr rate limit; still in Primecoin v0.1.5xpm. bitcoincore.org github.com
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

59,973,511 XPM are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.

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

Launched 7 July 2013 by Sunny King with no genesis allocation; every block reward follows TargetGetMint (999 / difficulty^2 XPM) from block one.

No sale or presale.

The protocol pays the whole mint to the block finder. The 1% 'donation' in mikaelh's high-performance miner is an optional client-side setting, not a protocol cut.

clients is 0 because no implementation has had a release in the last 24 months. One miner address found 98.4% of recent blocks, so a single party controls block production. Searches found no 51% attack or reorg, but such an event would not show up later without live monitoring.

Sources: github.com · github.com · chainz.cryptoid.info · chainz.cryptoid.info · en.wikipedia.org. Researched 2026-10-26, medium confidence.

The work behind it

No source we can reach publishes a hashrate for Primecoin.

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 Primecoin

Primecoin is #236 among cryptocurrencies and #1856 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 1620 places between Primecoin'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).