How On Hive scores rails, coins, and corridors

Regulatory clarity — 25%

Analyst-scored read of a network's legal standing for regulated payment use: licensing posture, sanctions exposure, and how issuers and banks treat it. The largest single input, because a rail no compliance team will approve is not usable regardless of speed or cost.

Finality certainty — 20%

How irreversible a confirmed transaction is. Deterministic finality (Stellar, XRP Ledger, Hedera, Avalanche) scores 100; ZK-proof rollups 88; optimistic rollups with a 7-day fraud window (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism) 55; probabilistic chains where reorgs are possible (Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Tron) 38.

Cost efficiency — 20%

Derived from the live median transfer cost in USD, banded from 100 (under $0.00005) down to 5 (above $5.00). A sub-cent transfer scores in the 90s; a few cents in the 70s-80s; dollar-plus fees fall below 40.

Institutional adoption — 20%

Analyst-scored measure of real regulated-entity usage: banks, licensed payment firms, and major stablecoin issuers building or settling on the network, weighted toward payments rather than trading or speculation.

Reliability — 15%

From 30-day network uptime, banded from 100 (>=99.9%) to 15 (<98.0%). Captures whether a rail stays up during the exact congestion or outage windows when a payment operator needs it most.

Peg stability

Computed live from the token's deviation from its reference value. Within 0.01% scores 100; the score steps down through 92, 80, 60, 35 and bottoms at 10 once deviation passes 0.5%. Yield-bearing tokens (e.g. tokenized-Treasury products) are excluded from peg logic entirely, because trading above $1.00 is their intended behavior, not a broken peg.

Reserve quality

Analyst-maintained score of what actually backs the token and how verifiable it is: cash and short-dated Treasuries versus riskier collateral, custody arrangement, and the strength and frequency of third-party attestations. Sourced from issuer transparency pages and the named attestation firm for each token.

Regulatory clarity

Analyst-maintained score of the issuer's regulatory standing: chartering, jurisdiction, and alignment with frameworks such as MiCA or a state trust charter.

Institutional adoption

Analyst-maintained score of regulated and enterprise usage of the token for settlement, distinct from raw trading volume.

Velocity

From annualized turnover (24h volume x 365 / market cap), banded from 100 (>50x) to 25 (<2x). A proxy for whether a token is actually used to move money versus sitting idle.

The gap between the street price of dollars (USDT) inside a country and that country's official USD exchange rate. A positive premium means people are paying above the official rate to hold dollars, an early read on currency stress and demand for stablecoin dollars.

How it is computed: Each day we take the median USDT sell price on Binance P2P for a country's local currency and compare it to the official USD rate for that currency. The percentage gap is stored as a daily time series so week-over-week moves can be measured.

How much a large stablecoin swap actually costs to execute on a given chain, versus a small reference trade. It answers a question raw TVL cannot: can this chain absorb a real payment-sized order without heavy slippage?

How it is computed: Each day we route a $1,000,000 USDC-to-USDT swap and a $10,000 reference swap through a DEX aggregator on each chain and record the price impact in basis points and the dollar cost of the size difference. Quotes with implausible impact or a bad reference rate are filtered out.