Author: CyberPunkMetalHead, AESIR Joint Creation Source: medium Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

I did something like 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 capitalization in a tier 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 field.

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. So, the ranking factors are as follows:

• Decentralization

• Scalability

• Security

• Utility

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

I am excluding stablecoins, and the rationale for each will be brief and clear — no need to go into great detail. After much thought, I have decided to include memecoin this time around.

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

Grade F – Lowest Grade

• Kaspa (KAS)

This one blew my mind. Kaspa is committed to creating a mobile, borderless settlement layer for cryptocurrencies. If this doesn’t mean a lot 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, in order to take advantage of this, you need to go to the Kaspa faucet and take some change to offset the fees — so the transactions are not technically free.

Kaspa is not decentralized, but they promise that 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 a marketing campaign.

Whatever use case the project had, it has been overshadowed by reckless influencer dumping, hindering 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 "made for memes".

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

PEPE’s roadmap is as follows:

Phase 1: Meme
Phase 2: Vibe and HODL
Phase 3: Meme Takes Over

Pepe is firmly in the F tier.

• Shiba Inu (SHIB)

The story of PEPE is similar, except that Shiba Inu has been on the market for a long time and 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 - I guess points for actually building something?

Therefore, SHIB received a high grade of F.

• LEO (Leo)

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

Beyond this, there is little use, and of course, we can't talk about decentralization or security here.

LEO gets a high F point.

Grade D — OK, but flawed

• Tron (TRX)

Tron was founded in 2017 by Justin Sun with an initial mission 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 whitepapers from projects like IPFS and Filecoin.

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

Despite the aforementioned issues and its founder’s controversial image 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’s 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 never seems to be 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 is mainly a store of value, BCH is competitive in indicators such as TPS and low transaction fees.

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

Bitcoin Cash received a lower D grade.

• Binance Smart Chain (BNB)

Binance Smart Chain is Binance’s own blockchain. It currently has a theoretical 2000 TPS, and Binance is working to increase it to 10000 TPS while reducing its already low fees by 10x.

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

BNB ranks high in our D grade.

Grade C - Huge Potential

• ICP (Internet Computer)

When ICP first entered 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 mismanaging the token, causing its token supply to inflate beyond recovery.

Price action aside, however, 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 that vision, promising some of the most efficient smart contract computations available, as well as the ability to use AI models directly on-chain.

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

ICP is a good project, but similar to Tron, it can’t seem to shake off the bad 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 an independent project, Dogecoin is not terrible.

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

Since it’s the OG of all memecoins and has likely facilitated wider adoption of cryptocurrency, Doge gets an honorary spot in the C-tier.

Grade 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 guarantee future development is its first-mover advantage, but it lacks a strong selling point.

Litecoin ranks lower in the B grade. If you have seen my previous list, you will notice that I promoted it from the C grade.

• Ripple (XRP)

I used to joke that Ripple was a stablecoin — but they have been fighting for the future of this industry, which is commendable.

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

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 B point for driving regulatory adoption.

• Near Protocol (NEAR)

NEAR Protocol is a scalable blockchain that focuses on usability and user experience. It uses sharding in the background to achieve high transaction throughput, but does not place 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 has a theoretical TPS of 100,000, but it has only reached a little over 100 so far, so there is still a long way to go.

Near received a high B grade for its innovation and potential, especially because it is committed to making this space less confusing - which 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 promise.

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 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 had been around for a while and was still in a promising phase, it would most likely be in the C grade.

• Avalanche (AVAX)

Avalanche is a universal smart contract platform for decentralized applications.

It leverages the unique setup of 3 blockchains that work in tandem with each other to provide scalable solutions for rapidly growing dapps.

The AVAX ecosystem currently includes Pangolin, SushiSwap, UniSwap, and more. The only thing holding AVAX back is the recent security issues and hacks totaling $100 million.

So it wouldn't rank any higher than a B at this point.

Grade A — Excellent Projects

• 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 may find some code forked from UniSwap in most dexes.

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

UniSwap receives a solid A rating.

• Cardano (ADA)

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

Despite having no usable 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 features. Cardano has never claimed to be the best in one specific area, but rather has a unique balance in most areas.

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

• Solana (SOL)

I must admit, I had a hard time with this one. 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 its issues, the chain has been halted multiple times in the past and transactions can seem 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 has yet to be resolved. Overall, however, the future looks bright for Solana.

Here’s why it makes the A grade.

• Polygon (MATIC)

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

Polygon has become a scaling solution for Ethereum L2 with their zk rollup scaling solution as well as sidechains, and they have done an excellent job innovating in this space 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 receives a solid A rating.

• Polkadot (DOT)

Polkadot is awesome. It keeps hitting milestones, and without 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 alternative coin with blue-chip potential — which is why it’s high on the A list.

S-Level — Blue Chip/Legend

• Bitcoin (BTC)

Let’s be clear here, BTC, as the instigator of it all, 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 top of 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 practicality 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's the full tier list: