By purpose

Cryptocurrencies in the ranking grouped by what the chain is built to do — 310 chains across 13 purpose categories, $2.07T combined.

Smart-contract platform

Chains whose base layer executes arbitrary programs — from Ethereum's EVM to Solana's Sealevel to CosmWasm.

64 chains$353.2B combined

General purpose

Chains without a single dominant use case — the ledger hosts payments, contracts, tokens and applications in comparable measure.

14 chains$23M combined

Payments

Chains built to move money.

138 chains$20.7B combined

Private payments

Chains where transaction amounts and participants are hidden by default — via zero-knowledge proofs, ring signatures, or Mimblewimble-style aggregation.

31 chains$28.1B combined

Financial ledger

Chains whose native design is a financial ledger — settlement, lending, structured issuance — rather than a general-purpose computer.

16 chains$1.9B combined

Settlement ledger

Chains built as clearing rails for large-value transfers rather than end-user payments.

5 chains$1.55T combined

Exchange chain

Chains launched by a specific exchange as its native chain.

8 chains$109.1B combined

Interoperability hub

Chains whose primary product is moving assets and messages between other chains — cross-chain bridges, light-client hubs, and interoperability layers.

7 chains$2.3B combined

Decentralized storage

Chains whose consensus rewards providers who reserve and prove storage rather than compute or stake.

5 chains$1.2B combined

Distributed compute

Chains selling distributed computation — GPU cycles, model inference, generic workload — as their native product.

8 chains$1.6B combined

DePIN

Decentralised Physical Infrastructure — chains whose token pays participants for supplying hardware in the physical world (wireless coverage, GPU capacity, sensors, storage).

5 chains$652M combined

Gaming

Chains built around gaming — either as the venue for in-game economies or as game infrastructure (asset issuance, matchmaking, verifiable randomness).

7 chains$70M combined

AI

Chains whose native workload is AI: training data markets, model registries, agent coordination.

2 chains$2.5B combined

Categories are curated in-house — see methodology for the definitions. A chain without a stated purpose on its own page is not filed under one here either.