I did this once a few years ago, and the cryptocurrency market has changed a lot since then. I think we are long overdue for a new tier list.

Just like last time, I will rank the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap in a tiered list from F to S and provide reasons.

The ranking criteria is based on each currency’s ability to solve the blockchain trilemma and the utility they bring to the space.

The ranking will take into account how close each project is to solving the blockchain trilemma, as well as the utility they bring to the crypto world. Therefore, the ranking factors are as follows:

• Decentralization

• Scalability

• Safety

• Utilities

While the rankings are primarily data-driven, and I do my best to provide reasoning behind each decision, ultimately this is my own interpretation and opinion of where each chain ranked in each of the above categories.

I’m leaving stablecoins out of this list, and the rationale for each will be brief and clear — no need to go into detail. After careful consideration, I’ve decided to include memecoin this time around.

With this as our initial setup, let’s start ranking.

F level - lowest level

• Kaspa (KAS)

This one blew my mind. Kaspa is working to create a mobile, borderless settlement layer for cryptocurrencies. If this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, that’s because it doesn’t.

Reading through their mission statement, I couldn’t find anything special about the project, other than zero-fee transactions between individual wallets. However, to take advantage of this, you need to go to the Kaspa faucet and withdraw some change to offset the fees — so the transactions are not technically free.

Kaspa is not decentralized, but they promise they are working towards that goal. Kasta has been accused of being an “influence coin” and they allegedly airdropped large amounts of tokens to influencers as part of their marketing campaign.

Whatever use case the project had, it was overshadowed by reckless influencer dumping, hampering growth and adoption.

Kaspa currently scores poorly, but there may be room for improvement.

• Pepe (PEPE)

Not much to say. PEPE is another memecoin whose purpose can be summed up as "for memes".

I can say that Pepe helps with wider adoption, but I don’t think a highly volatile, copy-pasted, directionless memecoin is the onboarding experience people want in crypto.

PEPE’s roadmap is as follows:

Phase 1: Meme
Phase 2: Vibe and HODL
Phase 3: Meme Takeover

Pepe is firmly in the F grade.

• Shiba Inu

The story with PEPE is similar, except that the Shiba Inu had been on the market for so long that the developers got bored and started building things on top of it.

More specifically, SHIB launched its own DEX — Shiba Swap — which is just a fork of UniSwap, but still — points for actually building something I guess?

Therefore, SHIB received a high grade of F.

• LEO

LEO is Bitfinex’s utility token, which traders can use to reduce fees when trading on the exchange, as well as access a variety of lending and other financial tools designed to help traders.

Beyond that it’s not very useful and of course, we can’t talk about decentralization or security here.

LEO obtains a higher F-point.

D-grade - OK, but flawed

• TRON (TRX)

Founded by Justin Sun in 2017, Tron’s original mission was to accelerate the decentralization of the internet through blockchain and dApps. If this sounds familiar, it’s likely because Tron has been accused of plagiarizing existing white papers from projects like IPFS and Filecoin.

In 2018, Tron acquired BitTorrent, showing that their mission to decentralize the internet might be real.

Despite the above issues and the controversial image of its founder in the media, Tron has continued to grow and become the largest settler of USDT. Tron can achieve the advertised 2000 TPS speed with low transaction fees, but in reality it is closer to 80 TPS.

Recently, Justin Sun was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the project has seemingly never been able to shake off its questionable beginnings.

Tron has a lower rating of D.

• Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

BCH is a hard fork of BTC.

The original intention of the BCH fork was to provide higher scalability than Bitcoin. However, the scalability of BCH has not yet been proven.

Unlike BTC, which we all think of primarily as a store of value, BCH is competitive in metrics like TPS and low transaction fees.

BCH can manage about 79 TPS. Given that there are already thousands of projects, this Bitcoin fork is likely to take advantage of its early advantage.

Bitcoin Cash received a lower D rating.

• Binance Smart Chain (BNB)

Binance Smart Chain is Binance’s own blockchain. It currently has a theoretical capacity of 2,000 TPS, and Binance is working to increase it to 10,000 TPS while reducing its already low fees by 10x.

My main criticism is that BNB is completely centralized. But luckily, if you run into trouble with it, you can contact their support team.

BNB ranks high in our D grade.

C-level – great potential

• ICP (Internet Computer Programming Interface)

When ICP first hit the market, its price soared to $2,000 per coin, but a few years later, each token was only trading at around $6. The team was accused of token mismanagement, causing its token supply to inflate beyond repair.

However, regardless of the price trend, ICP promised at launch to bring to market a fast, cheap decentralized computing platform that would serve as a fair alternative to AWS and traditional cloud computing.

Since its launch in May 2021, ICP has continued to deliver on this vision, promising some of the most efficient smart contract computations and the ability to use AI models directly on-chain.

ICP has come a long way since the price fiasco, and the fact that full-scale applications can be run on ICP puts it far ahead of most existing smart contract chains.

ICP is a good project, but similar to Tron, it can’t seem to shake off the poor first impression it made.

Perhaps over time it will be able to regain investor trust and entice developers to start deploying applications on ICP instead of AWS.

Time will tell. For now, it ranks lower on our list.

• Dogecoin (DOGE)

As a standalone project, Dogecoin isn't terrible.

Essentially, Dogecoin is a fork of Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin. It has a large enough community to keep it decentralized and secure. The main problem is that for a memecoin, it doesn’t have much utility — and in and of itself, that’s fine.

Since it is the OG of all memecoins and has likely facilitated wider adoption of cryptocurrency, Doge has been given an honorary place in the C-tier.

Level B - Robust Projects

• Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin is an old-line currency, and some even consider it a blue chip stock. As mentioned earlier, Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin that has undergone some substantial changes to ensure that it is "lighter" than Bitcoin itself. It uses the Scrypt hashing algorithm instead of the SHA-256 encryption algorithm and generates 1 block every 2.5 minutes, compared to 10 minutes for Bitcoin.

However, at around 56 TPS, there are many other faster alternatives. The only thing that LTC can secure in the future is its first-mover advantage, but it lacks a strong selling point.

Litecoin is ranked lower on the B grade. If you looked at my previous list, you would have noticed that I bumped it up from the C grade.

• Ripple (XRP)

I used to joke that Ripple was a stablecoin — but they are to be commended for fighting for the future of this industry.

Ripple is aimed at the banking system and its mission is to change the way banks operate around the world.

Ripple actually does a lot of things behind the scenes, such as working with global banks to create a universal transfer layer that can be used by all banking institutions.

Ripple gets a solid Point B for driving regulatory adoption.

• Near Protocol (NEAR)

NEAR Protocol is a scalable blockchain focused on usability and user experience. It uses sharding in the background to achieve high transaction throughput without placing the burden of understanding network partitions on users or developers.

Due to its developer-friendly approach, developing dApps on Near is relatively simple compared to other chains. It also has human-readable account names and other small QOL features that are very valuable for users looking to join the space.

Near’s theoretical TPS is 100,000, but it has only reached a little over 100 so far, so there is still a long way to go.

Near gets a high B grade for its innovation and potential, especially because it aims to make the field less cluttered — something that is desperately needed.

• base (BASE)

Base is Coinbase's L2 solution for the Ethereum network. Unlike BNB, which is fully centralized and managed by Binance, Base is committed to decentralization. However, it is worth noting that Base has not yet delivered on its promises.

Base is using account abstraction to simplify the developer experience when building on Ethereum, which can increase adoption and build better software.

The only reason Base is listed in the B grade is because I have faith in it. In theory, it sounds great, but there are several considerations, including its reliance on Coinbase.

If it has been around for a while and is still in the promising stage, it will most likely be ranked in the C grade.

• Avalanche (AVAX)

Avalanche is a general-purpose smart contract platform for decentralized applications.

It leverages a unique setup of 3 blockchains working in tandem with each other to provide a scalable solution for rapidly growing dapps.

The AVAX ecosystem currently includes Pangolin, SushiSwap, UniSwap, etc. The only thing that is dragging down AVAX is the recent security issues and hacker attacks totaling $100 million.

Therefore, it would not be ranked higher than B grade at this time.

Level A - Excellent Project

• UniSwap (UNI)

Uniswap is the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) built on the EVM. In many ways, it is the granddaddy of most modern DEXs, and you’ll likely find some code forked from UniSwap in most dexes.

UniSwap has contributed greatly to the industry in terms of both adoption and usability.

UniSwap received a solid A rating.

• Cardano (ADA)

Cardano has earned mid-A project status due to its smart contract platform, but mostly because it has been a household name for quite some time.

Despite having no available platform for over 5 years, Cardano has managed to maintain its top 10 market cap position.

Cardano's long-term vision is to build something called RealFi (Real World DeFi). It has both strong security and a wide range of functions. Cardano has never claimed to be the best in a particular field, but has maintained a unique balance in most areas.

Knowing Cardano, the sun will collapse before RealFi comes along, but you never know. I reluctantly give it an A-grade placement.

• Solana (SOL)

I must admit, I’m having a hard time with this. Solana has been making the right moves lately, and with the launch of Token Extensions, it is truly a force to be reckoned with in the space.

That’s not to say Solana doesn’t have issues, the chain has stalled multiple times in the past and transactions appear to hang at times. On the bright side, it has a vibrant and growing ecosystem, community adoption, vision, and tons of use cases. The only thing that keeps me from giving it a solid A rating is the occasional chain stall issue, which remains unresolved to this day. Overall, however, the future looks bright for Solana.

That's why it ranks in the A-grade category.

• Polygon (MATIC)

The role that Polygon plays in the cryptocurrency space is absolutely crucial and is one of the first L2s that has been proven to work efficiently and without too much drama.

Polygon has become the scaling solution for Ethereum L2 with their zk rollup scaling solution as well as sidechains, and they have done a great job innovating in this area and alleviating Ethereum congestion.

However, as the L2 space becomes increasingly crowded, Polygon can no longer rest on its first-mover advantage and needs to continue to innovate to stay relevant.

Polygon received a solid A rating.

• Polkadot(DOT)

Polkadot is awesome. It keeps hitting milestones and is free of the drama that is prevalent on other chains. If you exclude the recent marketing fiasco, Polkadot’s marketing team is basically just burning money.

However, this does not affect the fundamentals.

As a smart contract platform, its parachain implementation may be a bit ahead of its time, and many users in the space may already be aware of the real use cases for parachains, but Polkadot is actually the only altcoin with blue-chip potential — which is why it ranks high on the A list.

S Tier — Blue Chip/Legendary

• Bitcoin (BTC)

Let’s be clear here, BTC, as the instigator of all this, gets an honorary spot at the bottom of the S list.

It’s not the fastest network, nor is it the cheapest. In fact, it’s barely usable without the Lightning Network (which hasn’t been fully rolled out yet). But it’s the safest way to store value.

• Ethereum (ETH)

The first place in our tier list belongs to Ethereum, the first smart contract platform to bring Web3 here.

It has revolutionized the crypto space and will continue to do so as its utility remains paramount. It is supported by numerous layer 2 solutions to ease network congestion and is generally loved by the industry for all its contributions to the space.

Ethereum has a talented development team and it's getting better and better over time. I think it deserves to be at the top of the list.

Here is the full tier list: