Proof of stake coins on a live bubble chart

Every coin on this page secures its blockchain with proof of stake: people lock up coins as collateral instead of burning electricity to mine. Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, Tron, Polkadot and most other large networks work this way, and the bubbles show how their PoS coins are trading right now, sized and colored by the move.

It's a filtered view of the main chart. On the home page, every crypto bubble in the top 1,000 shows up at once, which is useful until Bitcoin's circle eats half the screen. Bitcoin isn't here. That's the point of the filter.

Why nearly everything but Bitcoin ends up on this page

Proof of stake won. Not the argument, which people still have on podcasts every week, but the market share. Among the ten largest smart contract chains, every one runs some form of it, and Ethereum's switch in September 2022 moved the second-biggest network in crypto over in a single upgrade. Its energy use dropped by more than 99.9% overnight.

So this category overlaps heavily with the layer 1 coins page. The difference is the filter: that page groups chains by what they are, this one groups them by how they reach agreement. A few coins fall on one list and not the other.

The practical upshot for reading the chart is that PoS coins tend to move together. They share investors and the same staking-yield story, and often the same Ethereum-versus-everyone-else argument. When the whole page turns one color, it's rarely about consensus design. It's the market.

What is proof of stake, minus the jargon

Validators put up the network's own coin as a deposit. The protocol picks validators to propose and confirm blocks and pays them in new coins and fees for doing it. If they cheat or go badly offline, it destroys part of their deposit, a penalty called slashing. Honesty is enforced by having something to lose rather than by having spent money on hardware.

On Ethereum the deposit is 32 ETH per validator, though the Pectra upgrade in May 2025 let a single validator hold up to 2,048 ETH so big operators could consolidate. Most people never run a validator at all. They delegate coins to one, through a wallet or an exchange, and take a share of the rewards minus a commission.

The first coin to use proof of stake was Peercoin, launched in August 2012 by a pseudonymous developer calling himself Sunny King (a better name than most crypto founders manage). It's still running, as far as I know, at a size that wouldn't register as a bubble here.

Proof of stake vs proof of work, and who pays for security

The real difference is where the cost of attacking the network sits. Under proof of work, an attacker needs to buy or rent enough mining hardware and power to outpace everyone else. Under proof of stake, an attacker needs to buy enough of the coin, and the coin they'd need gets more expensive the more they buy, and the protocol can destroy it if they misbehave.

Proof of stake is far cheaper to run and much easier on the environment. Its critics have two points worth taking seriously. Stake tends to concentrate: whoever holds the most coins earns the most new ones, and big exchanges and liquid staking protocols end up controlling large shares. And a proof of stake chain has no outside anchor like energy spent; its security ultimately rests on the coin keeping its value.

I lean toward proof of stake for everything except Bitcoin. Bitcoin's whole identity is not changing, and proof of work suits that. For a chain that wants to upgrade and run applications, burning energy to order transactions looks like a cost with no upside anymore.

Delegated proof of stake and the other flavors

"Proof of stake" covers a family of designs, and the differences show up in how much a small holder can do.

Delegated proof of stake hands block production to a small elected group. Tron has 27 Super Representatives chosen by token-holder votes, and EOS ran with 21 block producers. It's fast and cheap, and it's also the version critics call a cartel with a voting booth, since the same few operators tend to keep winning. Cardano's Ouroboros goes the other way: you delegate to a stake pool without locking anything, and your ADA stays spendable the whole time. Polkadot uses nominated proof of stake, where nominators back validators and share their penalties if those validators misbehave.

None of this changes the price chart much. It changes what happens to your coins when you stake, which the next table covers.

PoS coins you'll see here, and how long your stake gets stuck

This proof of stake crypto list covers the coins that usually appear as the biggest bubbles. The column most people skip is the unstaking wait: the time between asking for your coins back and being able to sell them.

A long unbonding period is the part that bites. If DOT drops 30% in the week after you request an unstake, you're watching it happen with no way to sell. The 21-day and 28-day waits look harmless on a quiet chart and feel very different on a red one.

The yield that isn't quite income

Most PoS networks pay stakers mainly in newly created coins. That's fine, but it means the headline yield is partly just keeping pace. If a network issues 7% new supply a year and you stake at 7%, your share of the network stays roughly the same; the people who didn't stake are the ones being diluted.

The share of supply staked tells you how much that matters. Solana and Cardano have typically had well over half their supply staked, Ethereum closer to a third. On chains where most holders stake, not staking is effectively a slow tax. The staking calculator shows what a given yield compounds to over time, and it's worth running with a lower price assumption as well as the current one, because the rewards arrive in the same coin whose bubble you're watching.

I have no patience for "passive income" framing on staking. A 5% yield on a coin that falls 60% in a year is a 58% loss with extra paperwork.

Liquid staking, and the week stETH slipped

Liquid staking protocols stake your coins and hand you a receipt token you can trade or use in DeFi. Lido's stETH is the biggest by far; at its peak Lido controlled close to a third of all staked ETH, which made Ethereum researchers openly nervous about one protocol getting that large.

Receipt tokens are only as liquid as the market for them. In June 2022, with Celsius freezing withdrawals and Three Arrows Capital unwinding, stETH traded as low as roughly 0.94 ETH on secondary markets, because at the time staked ETH couldn't be withdrawn at all. Anyone forced to sell took the discount. Withdrawals were enabled in April 2023, which mostly closed that gap, but the lesson carries over to every liquid staking token on every chain.

Lots of people pair liquid staking tokens with the base coin in a pool to earn trading fees on top of the staking yield. That adds impermanent loss whenever the two drift apart, and a liquidity pool calculator shows how much a depeg like June 2022 would have cost.

Where the chart stops being useful

Bubbles show price, and price is the least interesting thing about a proof of stake network. For current staking yields per network, stakingrewards.com is the reference most people use. It's good. For Ethereum specifically, beaconcha.in shows validator counts and queue lengths in real time, plus every slashing event. Neither tells you where a coin is trading this week, which is the one thing this page does well.

Category membership comes from CoinGecko's proof of stake tag, so it's broad. The tag catches plenty of small tokens that happen to run on a PoS chain rather than securing one, and I'd prune half of them if it were up to me. It isn't.

Picking between two green PoS coins

Say SOL and ADA are both bright green on the 7d view and you're thinking of buying one to stake. Click each bubble and check whether volume rose with the price, since thin-volume rallies fade. Then look at the table above: SOL comes back in two or three days if you unstake, ADA never locks at all, and those terms matter more on a bad week than on a good one. Finally, run a cryptocurrency comparison of the two against Bitcoin over 1Y. If both track BTC closely, the choice between them is mostly about staking terms and fees, not about which one will outperform.