Fifteen major mineable coins trace back to nine hashing lineages — and $1.25T of the $1.29T sits on Bitcoin’s SHA-256d
Asked:
“Draw an evolutionary tree of all major minable cryptocurrency by hashing algorithm”
Scope: currently mineable proof-of-work coins with at least $100 million market capitalization on the live CoinGecko PoW category page, observed 2026-09-03 — 15 coins across 9 algorithm families. Beldex clears the cutoff on the page but is excluded: it migrated away from PoW and is no longer mineable. Market caps are volatile snapshots in US dollars.
solid — algorithm descent / chain forkdotted — merge mining or coin ancestryleaf area ∝ log of market cap
Bitcoin alone is $1.25 trillion — about 97% of the 15-coin total — and three of its descendants (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, eCash) still mine the same SHA-256d hash.
coingecko.comDogecoin ($11.1B) has been merge-mined with Litecoin since 2014 via AuxPoW; the same Scrypt work secures both chains.
litecoin.watchMonero is the only major coin that repeatedly changed its own algorithm — CryptoNight → CryptoNightR → RandomX — to stay CPU-mineable and ASIC-resistant.
minerstat.comTwo of the 15 are hybrid PoW/PoS: Decred (BLAKE-256 14-round) and Zano (ProgPoWZ); mining still produces their blocks, so both stay in scope.
minerstat.com
Roster — click a header to sort
| Coin | Ticker | Algorithm | Family | Consensus | Market cap | Sources |
|---|
What “evolutionary” means here. The tree’s primary hierarchy is hashing-algorithm lineage: proof of work → design family → current algorithm → coin. Coin/code forks are a related but distinct genealogy — Bitcoin Cash forked Bitcoin’s chain yet kept its algorithm; Zcash forked Bitcoin’s code yet swapped in Equihash. Solid links show algorithm descent and chain forks inside a family; dotted links show merge mining or coin ancestry that crosses the algorithm hierarchy. Dogecoin technically descends through Luckycoin from Litecoin, but Luckycoin is below the cutoff and omitted.
Data: live CoinGecko Proof-of-Work category page (names, ranks, prices, market caps) observed 2026-09-03; algorithm assignments cross-checked against Minerstat’s mineable-coins table and mining references (MiningPoolStats, CoinGuides, WhatToMine, CoinWarz); lineage from fork-history research across official docs and Wikipedia. 15 coins shown of the full PoW category; coins under $100M market cap and non-mineable coins (including Beldex) cut for scope. Market caps are USD snapshots and volatile.