CryptoGrade exists because one investor got tired of answering the same question by hand.

Our Co-Founder and CEO, Erik Suhonen, has been in crypto since 2017. In his words: "Knowing that I had been in crypto since 2017, many people were coming to me asking me what crypto they should invest in. I would run them through my framework person by person."

That is the whole origin of this company, and it is worth sitting with the shape of it. There was already a framework. It already worked well enough that people kept asking for it. What there was not, for years, was a way for anyone else to use it without Erik in the room.

Ask an active crypto investor what they are missing and very few of them say data. They have exchange screens, aggregator pages, charts, newsletters, podcasts and a timeline that never stops. The complaint is not scarcity. It is that none of it resolves into a comparison.

Erik's account of what the pre-CryptoGrade years cost him is specific, and it is about that exact gap:

"It cost me time. I spent too much time trying to read articles, listen to podcasts, read charts, stay on top of a fast-changing industry, etc. Just to figure out what crypto to invest in at that time. I knew there had to be a better way."

And his read of why other people kept coming to him rather than doing the same work themselves: "Most people don't want to spend months or years learning how to read tons of data and charts just to get the answer to a simple question: what crypto should I buy or sell right now?"

We publish research and grades, so we will say the boundary out loud before going further: we do not answer that question for any individual, and nothing we publish is personal advice. What a framework can do is make assets comparable, and make the comparison inspectable. That is the thing he was doing by hand.

"I got into crypto in 2017," he says. "There was much less info back then. I absorbed all I could."

Anyone who was there will recognise the asymmetry. Less information, less tooling, far fewer places where an asset's token design was written down at all, and a much higher chance that absorbing all of it was actually possible. A framework built under those conditions had to be opinionated about what matters, because there was no option of simply piling on more inputs.

The background he brought to it: "I have been in business and technology most of my career. I've loved finance since I got my MBA. I have been investing since my 20s. I'm deep into AI now. CryptoGrade is a perfect intersection for me with investing, crypto and AI."

He did not build the framework alone. It came, in his words, from "years of collaborating with some of the brightest minds in investing, math and AI," and CryptoGrade has a Co-Founder alongside him.

This is the part of the story we find most interesting, because it is the opposite of how a crypto product usually arrives.

"I do use this privately," Erik says. "I proved that it worked for years before I decided to put it out publicly for the world to use too."

That is his claim about his own use, and we are going to label it as exactly that rather than dress it up. It is not a published performance record, and we are not presenting it as one. What we publish is narrower and checkable: a score, a letter grade, a position in a ranking and our research notes for each asset we rate, every figure stated against the date it was read from. If you want to argue with us, argue with that.

One of our stated principles is that we are willing to change our mind. It is easy to put a line like that on a page, so here is one with a name attached.

"I have reversed my belief about AI," he says. "I used to think it was not that useful. Now we have an army of AI agents working on behalf of CryptoGrade’s customers around the clock to help provide a sophisticated but simple-to-understand score and grade for each crypto asset. We designed CryptoGrade to utilize the most powerful models with both proprietary data and real-time public data. We joke that we provide a ‘AI-powered investing mullet’: power in the back and easy in the front. It’s clear to me now that agentic finance is the future."

A rating company that cannot say which of its own beliefs it got wrong is asking you to trust a process it will not describe.

A framework that lives in one person's head can be as good as you like and still be unusable by anyone else, because nobody can see the weighting. So the first thing we published was the weighting.

Six dimensions carry the score, and these are the published weights:

Naming what you look at is common. Publishing how much each part counts is the part that lets you disagree with us precisely, and precise disagreement is what we want from this reader.

On top of the weighted score sit nine pass or fail screens, covering conditions such as an anonymous or unaccountable team, unaudited or previously exploited contracts, supply concentrated in insider wallets, and thin or wash traded liquidity. A tripped screen places an asset in our F grade at any score, including a score high enough for a much better band. Our published bands are 80 and above for A, 60 to just under 80 for B, 40 to just under 60 for C and below 40 for F, with those screens overriding all four. Because of that we always quote the grade our record publishes and never work a letter out from a score, and our record does not say which screen applies to a given asset, so we do not guess in public.

The whole framework is written up at cryptograde.ai/framework.

Here is what comes out the other end. On our October 14, 2026 record, Bitcoin (BTC) is our number one rated crypto asset, graded A / Prime with a score of 87.2, and the one line assessment our record carries for it that day is not a cheer: "Bitcoin remains structurally strong, but valuation is not obviously cheap."

That sentence is the difference between structured research (a leading indicator) and a price dashboard (a lagging indicator). A dashboard tells you what Bitcoin did. Our record tells you where it sits on a framework that also grades assets making completely different claims, and tells you which part of the case is doing the work and which part is not.

The last of the ten questions we put to Erik was what would make him shut CryptoGrade down. Most founders decline that one, which is precisely why the answer is worth printing.

"Only if people didn't find CryptoGrade useful," he said. "We are constantly listening to our customers’ feedback. So far, customers around the world are telling us that AI-powered and simple-to-understand scores are critical for their crypto investing. CryptoGrade needs to continue to help educate people and support their needs into the future."

That is a usable standard, and it is the one we would like to be held to. The framework was built to answer a question for people one at a time. The company only justifies itself if the published version does the same job at scale.

Our ranking is at cryptograde.ai/tokens, ordered by our own score rather than by market capitalization. Without a free account, you see the top 10.

A free account requires only an email address and opens our ranking beyond those 10, the research notes behind named graded assets, and Alerts: you pick the crypto assets you care about and you get on-demand email alerts when our grade on one of them changes. Create it at cryptograde.ai/sign-up.

One more thing, since it is the reason a piece like this can quote our own founder and still be worth reading: CryptoGrade does not work commercially with the assets or projects it covers, and it does not sell data. Nobody we grade pays us anything.