What a buyability grade means

A buyability grade is a letter from A to E summarizing how many exchanges are verified to sell a given coin where you live.

It sits on coin pages, on buy pages, and as a whole table at Buyability. It exists because a price chart cannot answer the question most people arrive with: not what is this worth, but can I get it, from here, today.

What the grade counts

The grade is arithmetic over the verification record and nothing else. The first input is how many exchanges carry a dated listing marked available for that coin in that jurisdiction, checked within the last 120 days. The second input matters only at the top of the scale: whether at least one of those exchanges publishes enough of a fee schedule for an all-in cost estimate.

That is the whole input list. No editorial judgment, no trust score, no affiliate relationship, and no price. Stale rows are dropped before the count, so an exchange last checked 121 days ago counts as unverified until someone re-checks it.

Two consequences follow, and both are deliberate. A coin that gets cheaper keeps its letter. A coin whose fifth exchange goes unverified for 121 days loses one. The grade measures how well the answer is evidenced, not how attractive the asset is.

A fresh listing marked limited is real coverage, but it is not what the grade counts. Limited means the venue will open an account and then restrict something: deposits, assets, or products. Those listings are published beside the letter as their own count.

The five letters

C is pinned to two on purpose. Below two verified exchanges a buy page prints no ranked table at all, because a ranking of one is not a ranking. C is the floor at which the question has a published answer.

The passport publishes more than the letter. It gives the verified and limited counts, the cheapest all-in cost on a $500 purchase where one is permitted, the union of payment rails and fiat currencies across the verified exchanges, whether any of them sells without full kyc, and the list of reasons that produced the letter. The letter is the summary. The reasons are what to read if you disagree with it.

Why cost pending is not zero

An all-in estimate needs three figures from the same exchange: the taker fee, the spread, and the deposit fee. If any one of the three is missing, that exchange gets no cost estimate, and it can never be named as the cheapest option anywhere on the site.

When no verified exchange in your jurisdiction clears that bar, the passport says the cost is pending, and it says how many verified exchanges publish at least part of a schedule so you can see how close the record is. What it never prints is $0.00. A figure we do not have and a purchase that costs nothing are different facts, and rendering them identically would make the cheapest-looking coin the one we know least about.

Where a cost is shown, the spread inside it is the 24-hour median measured on that venue's own order book for that asset where such a measurement exists, and the exchange's published estimate otherwise. The panel dates the measurement when it uses one.

Why the letter depends on where you live

Availability is local. A venue chooses which countries and US states it serves, which assets it offers in each of them, and whether it can accept your money at all. The same coin can therefore be a B in one country and an E in the next on the same day, from the same record, with nothing about the coin having changed.

US states inherit where they have no record of their own. A state with no rows is graded on the United States rows, and the panel says so rather than presenting an inherited grade as a local one.

The Bitcoin buy page for the United States is the ranked table sitting behind one of these letters, and the grade on it is computed from the same rows the table is built from, so the two can never disagree. If a letter surprises you, our guide to why some coins are not available where you live walks through why a coin goes missing in one place and not another, from geoblocking to a delisting nobody announced loudly.

Frequently asked questions