The Nakamoto coefficient is the minimum number of independent actors that need to collude to violate the blockchain consensus. By proof-of-work, we mean a mining pool with enough combined hashrate to rewrite the chain. By Proof-of-Stake, we mean a validator operator with enough total stake to stall it. A higher number means more parties need to agree before something breaks. A lower number means less.
Here’s why this number is more valuable than any number in your pitch deck. Ethereum has approximately 1,278,000 validators. Chainspect uses a Nakamoto coefficient of 1.
Metrics exist to reveal the gap between headline numbers and actual numbers.
Where did this number come from?
Balaji Srinivasan and Leland Lee published Quantifying Decentralization in July 2017. Their complaints were frank. Decentralization was the government’s main selling point. Bitcoin And then there was Ethereum, but very few people measured it.
They borrowed a framework from economics. The Lorenz curve plots how wealth is spread unevenly across a population. The Gini coefficient narrows down the curve to a single number between 0 and 1. Srinivasan and Lee applied the same idea to blockchain and added an extra step. The idea is to divide the system into essential subsystems, calculate the minimum number of entities needed to control each, and obtain the minimum result for all of them.
The lowest result is the lowest Nakamoto coefficient. The subsystems they listed included mining or staking, client software, developers, node operators, exchanges, and token ownership. In reality, almost all dashboards report only the consensus layer. This is because the consensus layer can be accurately measured and is the layer that fails the fastest.
The name pays homage to Satoshi Nakamoto and the characteristics that Bitcoin was built to have in the first place.
How is it calculated?
The method is simple. Data collection is the difficult part.
- Group and identify entities and their share of control by real-world operators rather than by individual nodes or validator keys.
- Rank from highest share to lowest share.
- Add shares cumulatively until a critical threshold is exceeded.
- Count the number of entities you need. That number is the coefficient.
The threshold depends on the consensus design.
- Proof-of-Work uses 51% of the hashrate. This is the point where a majority attack or chain reorganization is possible.
- Proof-of-stake typically uses 33% of the stake, which is enough to delay the finality of a BFT-style system. Some trackers use 50% instead.
Run on Bitcoin using live pool data. In the 7-day period ending July 17, 2026, mempool.space estimated Foundry USA’s hashrate at 27.6%, F2Pool at 17.8%, AntPool at 17.3%, ViaBTC at 9.5%, and SpiderPool at 5.7%.
- Foundry and F2Pool together account for 45.4%. Can’t reach the line.
- Adding AntPool reaches 62.7%. On top of that.
- There are 3 pools. The coefficient is 3.
Chainspect also reports the same numbers. Bitcoin operates 145 mining pools, 3 of which determine the answer.
Where are the major chains located?
Snapshot of Chainspect’s decentralization dashboard taken on July 17, 2026 12:52 UTC:
- Polka dots: 166 (@Polka dot pattern)
- TON (current network token is GRAM): 72 (@ton_blockchain)
- Avalanche: 25 (@avax)
- Sui: 19 (@sui network)
- Solana: 18 (@Solana)
- Cardano: 15 (@Cardano)
- Number of rooms: 14 (@aptos)
- ICP: 14 (@dfinity)
- Tron: 13 (@Trondao)
- Algorand: 12 (@Algorand)
- Tezos: 12 (@tezos)
- Multibirds X: 11 (@MultiversX)
- $NEAR:9(@NEARProtocol)
- Let’s do it: 8 (@seiNetwork)
- $BNB Chain: 7 (@BNBCHAIN)
- Ivy: 7 (@Ivy)
- Polygons: 4 (@0x polygon)
- Bitcoin: 3 (no single official central account)
- Stella: 3 (@StellarOrg)
- Ethereum: 1 (@Ethereum)
Reading them against the number of validators will automatically rearrange the rankings. Polkadot posts 166 posts from 600 validators. TRON posts 13 out of just 27 validator sets. This means that almost half of the super-delegates need to act together. MultiversX runs 3,250 validators and has a score of 11. Cardano runs 2,088 and has a score of 15.
Ethereum has more validators than all other chains on that list combined, placing it in first place. This is because the Chainspect group is pooled under operators who actually hold the keys and pool liquid staking providers. The amount of validators is not a distribution of control.
Rollups are less ambiguous and allow you to claim the same thing. Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Starknet, and Etherlink each list a single validator and a score of 1. Those sequencers are centrally managed, everyone in the field already knows about them, and few dashboards bother to quantify them.
Why is it important?
- Attack resistance. This puts numbers on how difficult it is for a 51% attack, censorship campaign, or chain stoppage to succeed in practice.
- Minimizing trust. Blockchain is touted as not requiring a trusted third party. A coefficient of 1 or 2 means you trust the third party, no matter what marketing says.
- risk assessment. Centralized management increases the potential for collusion, regulatory capture, and single points of failure.
- design target. Projects use it as a benchmark for themselves and to justify staking caps, delegation limits, and anti-concentration rules.
What they don’t tell me
This metric has real limitations, and it would be a mistake to treat it as a security score.
Entity identification is incomplete. Two validators run by the same company under different names will be counted as two. Dozens of validators residing in the same cloud area are counted as tens. Neither is true during a crisis.
The numbers move. Stake shifting, pool merging, and protocol upgrades. A screenshot from six months ago doesn’t tell you much about today.
And that’s looking at only one dimension. Client diversity, developer concentration, governance understanding, and geographic clustering are all outside the scope of the calculation. A chain can post strong coefficients and still be removed by one client bug or one regulator.
How fast the ground is moving is shown in the data itself. TON’s coefficient decreased by 13.25% in one day to 72, following a 13.27% decrease in the number of validators. And the scale of what’s behind the score cannot be seen from the score alone. Bitcoin and Fogo both hit 3. Bitcoin has 145 mining pools, which is 1.11,000 EH/s lower than that number. Fogo has 7 validators. Same score, but nothing else in common.
source of information
- Quantifying decentralization – Original July 2017 essay by Balaji S. Srinivasan and Leland Lee introducing the minimum Nakamoto coefficient.
- Chainspect Decentralized Dashboard – Live Nakamoto coefficient, validators, and staking data across 50+ blockchains is continuously updated.
- Bitcoin mining pool statistics – 7-day rolling pool hashrate distribution sourced from production data in the mempool.space block.
- Nakaflow – Alternative real-time Nakamoto coefficient tracker run by Chainflow. Useful for cross-checking entity groupings.
- What is the Nakamoto coefficient and how is it calculated? – Breakdown of the subsystem approach with ForkLog and links to Lorentz curves.
