We've written a lot about how CryptoGrade grades one crypto asset at a time, including six weighted dimensions, nine hard gates, one letter grade. A natural next question is what a rating like that implies once you're looking at more than one asset at a time. This issue walks through that, in general terms, using our own grade tiers as the vocabulary.
To be clear up front: this is a general illustration of tier logic, not advice for your specific situation, and not a real portfolio we're telling anyone to hold.
The four tiers, again
Every asset we grade lands in one of four bands:
A / Prime (score 80–100) — the highest band our framework assigns.
B / Sound (score 60–79) — solid on the weighted dimensions, without clearing the bar for the top band.
C / Speculative (score 40–59) — passed our nine disqualifier gates, but scored lower across the weighted dimensions.
F / Failed (score 0–39, or any score at all if a gate trips) either a low weighted score, or a hard disqualifier: an anonymous team, an unaudited contract, unsustainable yield, concentrated insider supply, or one of five other gate conditions. Any one of those forces an F regardless of what the weighted score would otherwise have been.
What that implies about an allocation, directionally
Our model doesn't tell any one reader what to buy, sell, or hold. But a tier system like this does carry a directional logic: an asset that cleared more of the framework at a higher level is, by our own scoring, doing more of what the framework is built to check for than one that barely passed, or one that didn't pass at all.
Say someone wanted to illustrate that logic with actual numbers, for example, thinking through how $10,000 might be split across the four tiers if tier alone were the only input. One directionally consistent way to apply it looks like this:
• A / Prime: the largest share of the illustration (about half).
• B / Sound: a meaningful but smaller share (a little over a third).
• C / Speculative: a small share, sized for money someone could afford to lose entirely.
• F / Failed: nothing. An asset that trips one of our nine disqualifier gates is excluded by definition (no weighted score offsets that).
Two things worth being explicit about. First, that split is our own illustration, not a formula CryptoGrade computes, publishes, or offers as a feature today, as we don't have a portfolio-construction product, and this isn't a preview of one. Second, it says nothing about which real, currently graded asset belongs in which tier right now, and that changes over time, is specific to each asset, and is exactly what our live grades (not this issue) are for.
What this is not
Not addressed to your specific situation. We don't know your time horizon, your risk tolerance, your tax situation, your existing holdings, or anything else about you.
Not a claim about any named asset's grade today. This issue doesn't say which real asset sits in which tier right now.
Not a price target, and not an instruction to buy, sell, or hold anything.
A tier tells you how an asset scored against our framework. What you do with that, if anything, depends on facts about you that we don't have and don't ask for.
Where this leaves you
If you want to see where a specific asset actually falls today, the top 10 are visible with no account at https://cryptograde.ai, and a free account gets you the full top 200, ranked by CryptoGrade's own score, highest to lowest.
If you want the mechanics behind how a grade gets made in the first place, we've written that up already:
How CryptoGrade grades an asset: https://blog.cryptograde.ai/p/how-cryptograde-grades-an-asset
What the six dimensions actually measure: https://blog.cryptograde.ai/p/what-the-six-dimensions-actually-measure
And if you're looking for a wider map of places to research crypto beyond CryptoGrade (data sites, newsletters, podcasts, and more) we published a roundup this week:
Best Crypto Investing Resources 2026: https://blog.cryptograde.ai/p/best-crypto-investing-resources
One free step
If you haven't already, create a free CryptoGrade account at https://cryptograde.ai to see the full top-200 ranking and the deeper per-asset detail behind it.
Invest wisely with AI-powered crypto scores and guidance.
Cheers,
The CryptoGrade team