The BYTE 500

The set of assets this site tracks, by rule. It is a coverage universe, not a benchmark: nothing is weighted, no index level is published, and nobody should trade against it. What it is for is saying, in public and in advance, which assets this site logs a price for, what gets an asset in and what gets it out, and when the list is reviewed — so that “we track 500 assets” is a claim anyone can check.

The list as it stands

Reviewed 2026-09-02 (2026-W36): 500 members of a target 500 — 3 with a page of their own, 497 tracked without one. 631 of 750 candidates qualified; 119 were excluded under the rules below. This is the first review; nothing entered or left, because there was no earlier list to compare with.

What qualifies

• Ranked by reported 24-hour trading volume, in US dollars, as the provider reports it at the review. Not by market cap: volume is what people actually trade and search for; market cap drags in assets that will never produce a story or a reader.
• Reviewed weekly, on Monday (UTC). Between reviews the list does not move whatever the market does.
• An asset enters at rank 500 or better and leaves only below rank 550, so an asset on the boundary is not added and removed every other week.
• The list is never padded. If the rules leave fewer than 500 qualifying assets, the BYTE 500 is shorter and this page says so.

What is excluded, and why

Every exclusion is by a stated rule, and the count under each at this review is printed:

• 102 were a tokenised stock, fund or ETF, or a wrapped, bridged, staked or leveraged form of another asset
• 7 shared a symbol with a higher-volume asset already admitted
• 4 had no price update from the provider inside the last hour
• 4 had a symbol outside the plain-character rule
• 1 used the symbol of an instrument already on this site's tape without being that instrument
• 1 had a name outside the plain-character rule

A name or symbol is taken exactly as its deployer wrote it or not at all: invisible formatting characters are removed before the rule is applied, and an asset whose name or symbol falls outside plain ASCII letters, digits and a short set of punctuation is excluded rather than rewritten into something its deployer did not choose. A symbol that would collide with an instrument already on this site’s tape — a tokenised NVDA is not NVIDIA — is excluded so it cannot write over that instrument’s row.

What a member gets, and does not

A member is tracked: its price is logged every few minutes on the same tape as every other instrument here, it can appear in the movers tables, and it is in the downloads. It has no page of its own, no row on the front page and no sentence written about it — an asset earns a page by producing a story, not by existing. A member that does gets promoted by the desk; an instrument that goes quiet is demoted, and its page stays at its address saying what it now is, because a permalink here is a promise.

Tracked assets that have produced at least two published stories in the last thirty days, and so qualify for a page under the rule above:

• Bitcoin (BTC) · 122 stories
• Ethereum (ETH) · 28 stories
• Solana (SOL) · 12 stories
• XRP (XRP) · 8 stories
• Hyperliquid (HYPE) · 3 stories
• Avalanche (AVAX) · 2 stories
• Chainlink (LINK) · 2 stories
• TRON (TRX) · 2 stories

What a review cannot do

A review that finds fewer than 400 qualifying assets, or whose fetch fails on any page, is refused: the previous list stands, and the refusal is a row in the price-gap ledger every download’s integrity report reads. A short answer from a data provider does not shorten the BYTE 500.

Every review, frozen

Each review is a record that is never rewritten, published here exactly as it was written:

• 2026-09-02

The members

Instrument pages · Movers · what we cannot see · the datasets