Every coin on TokenSonar receives a Legitimacy Score from 0–100 — a composite measure of how deeply a blockchain is integrated into real institutional finance. This is not a price prediction or investment rating. It reflects the strength and breadth of verified institutional adoption.
The composite score weights these dimensions based on their relative importance to institutional adoption. Regulatory and Institutions dimensions carry the highest weight. Scores are recalculated daily by the automated scoring pipeline.
85–100 High Adoption Deeply embedded in institutional finance — live production deployments at major global institutions, strong regulatory clarity, or approved ETF.
70–84 Growing Adoption Meaningful institutional traction — multiple live deployments, regulatory progress, growing ecosystem.
Below 70 Early Stage Early institutional interest — pilots, emerging regulatory frameworks, or niche institutional use cases.
Base scores reflect the editorial assessment of each coin's institutional status at the time of initial research. The automated pipeline then applies daily adjustments based on recent activity in the last 30 days:
currentScore = baseScore
+ (new regulatory licenses × 2)
+ (new institutional deployments × 1)
+ (high-importance ETF news × 3)
capped at 100
Portfolio allocation weights are recalculated proportional to current scores each time scores update, so the Token Allocation Explorer always reflects the latest institutional landscape.
| Source | What we use it for | Update cadence |
|---|---|---|
| rwa.xyz | On-chain RWA value per network — total tokenized assets settled on each chain | Daily (discovery agent) |
| DefiLlama | Protocol TVL for DeFi/RWA protocols; stablecoin market data; token fundamentals | Live (browser fetch) + Daily (discovery) |
| SoSoValue | Spot ETF AUM and daily net flow data for ETH, XRP, HBAR, LINK products | Live (browser fetch, ~5 min cache) |
| CoinGecko | Live token prices and 24h price change | Live (browser fetch, 60 second refresh) |
| Whale Alert | Large on-chain transactions ($500K+) — exchange inflows/outflows as institutional signal proxy | Live (browser fetch via server proxy, 5 min refresh) |
| CryptoQuant | Exchange flow data — inflow/outflow/reserve changes for ETH and XRP | Live (browser fetch via server proxy, 5 min refresh) |
| FINRA ATS | Weekly off-exchange trading percentage for crypto ETF tickers | Weekly (pipeline run) |
| 12 RSS feeds | Institutional news — The Block, CoinDesk, Finextra, PYMNTS, official project blogs, CoinTelegraph, Decrypt | Every 6 hours (pipeline run) |
| Claude API | News classification, new coin research — AI classifies relevance, extracts entities, researches candidates | Every 6 hours + daily discovery |
The total market value of real-world assets that have been tokenized and currently exist on a given blockchain. This includes tokenized government bonds, money market funds, private credit, real estate, and commodities. Sourced from rwa.xyz which aggregates data from on-chain contracts and issuer disclosures.
For DeFi protocols like Ondo Finance, the primary metric is TVL — the total value of assets deposited into smart contracts managed by the protocol. Sourced from DefiLlama.
For infrastructure protocols like Chainlink that don't hold assets themselves, we track the total value of financial transactions that flow through their oracle infrastructure. This is a measure of economic throughput, not custody.
TokenSonar runs a daily automated discovery agent that scans for new blockchains and protocols gaining meaningful institutional traction. The process:
1. Signal detection — The news pipeline flags any coin mentioned 2+ times with high/medium importance that isn't already in our registry. The discovery agent also scans rwa.xyz and DefiLlama for new networks with $50M+ in assets.
2. Research — Claude Sonnet researches each candidate and assesses qualification against objective criteria: real institutional adoption, meaningful RWA activity, $50M+ in assets or 5+ institutional deployments, and not already covered.
3. Auto-add — Qualified coins are automatically added to the dashboard with a starting portfolio weight of 1–3%. Existing coin weights are scaled down proportionally to make room. New coins display a "NEW" badge for 30 days.
4. Rejection — Coins that don't meet criteria are marked as rejected and won't be re-researched unless new signals emerge.
No coin pays to be listed. Coins are discovered and added entirely by automated signals and editorial research. Listing decisions are based solely on verifiable institutional adoption metrics.
TokenSonar has affiliate relationships with OKX, Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance. These relationships have zero influence on which coins are tracked, their scores, or how they are described. Affiliate partners are not granted favorable treatment in any part of the dashboard.
Score adjustments are applied by algorithm, not editorially. The base scores reflect research at the time of initial listing; dynamic adjustments are computed from pipeline data using fixed formulas documented above.
Institutional adoption data is sourced from public announcements, press releases, and on-chain data. Private deployments that have not been publicly disclosed are not reflected. Some institutions participate in multiple blockchain networks — they are counted separately per deployment.
Scores are snapshots. The institutional blockchain space moves rapidly. We recommend checking the data freshness indicator on the dashboard to understand when data was last updated.
Methodology questions or corrections: hello@tokensonar.com