1 – Bitcoin (BTC)
- Synonymous with “cryptocurrency”, Bitcoin has proudly claimed its place as the king of the crypto world.
- The cryptocurrency’s main purpose is to provide a peer-to-peer electronic version of cash that will allow payments to be sent online without any requirement for a third party (such as Mastercard).
- Bitcoin is fast moving towards its goal of becoming a currency accepted worldwide. The rapid rise in Bitcoin’s price has brought about an explosion of new Bitcoin investors
- A large number of merchants are now accepting Bitcoin as a legitimate form of payment.
2 – Ethereum (ETH)
- Ethereum is the revolutionary platform that brought the concept of “ smart contracts” to the blockchain.
- It came into existence in July 2015, by 21-year-old Vitalik Buterin.
- It possesses the ability for processing transactions more cheaply and rapidly.
3 – Ripple (XRP)
- Ripple aims to improve the speed of financial transactions, specifically international banking transactions.
- Anyone sending money internationally is well aware that it takes anywhere from 3-5 business days for a transaction to clear adding to that is the exorbitant transaction fees.
- Ripple’s aim is to make these transactions fast and cheap.
- Led by CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple team currently comprises over 150 people, making it one of the biggest in the cryptocurrency world.
4 – Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
- For years, a debate has been thriving in the Bitcoin community on whether to increase the block size.
- Bitcoin Cash was created after a “ hard fork” of the Bitcoin blockchain.
- As no consensus could be reached, the original Bitcoin blockchain was forked, leaving the Bitcoin chain untouched.
- Creating a new blockchain will allow developers to modify some of Bitcoin’s original programmed features.
- By allowing the block size to increase, more transactions can be processed in the same amount of time.
- Those opposed to Bitcoin Cash argue that increasing the block size will increase the storage and bandwidth requirement.
- Consequently it will price out normal users which would lead to increased centralization, the exact thing Bitcoin set out to avoid.
5 – Litecoin (LTC)
- Litecoin is a peer-to-peer transaction platform specially designed to be utilised as a digital currency.
- It has been designed to handle more transactions at lower costs, it is used to process the small transactions we carry out daily.
- It is also referred to as “digital silver” while Bitcoin is known as “digital gold”.
- The reason being conventionally, silver was utilised for small daily transactions while gold was used to store wealth and was not put to use in daily life.
- It was initially launched in 2011 when its founder, Charlie Lee, was still working for Google.
- The Litecoin blockchain is also a fork from the Bitcoin chain.
6 – Cardano (ADA)
- Cardano is a smart contract-oriented blockchain.
- It has tried to fix some of the most significant problems the cryptocurrency world aka scalability issues and democratized voting.
- It has massive potential to challenge Ethereum’s dominance in the smart contract world.
- It is quietly focusing on a strong software which will be completely open-source.
7 – NEO
- It is also referred to as “China’s Ethereum”NEO is a leading platform for smart contracts.
- It hopes to digitise many types of assets which were earlier kept in more traditional means, thus making it possible to use them in smart contracts.
- It has been found by Da Hongfei, a leading figure in the cryptocurrency world.
8 – Stellar Lumens (XLM)
- Stellar Lumens seeks to use blockchain to make lightning-fast international payments with a small fee.
- The network has the ability to handle thousands of transactions a second with only a 3-5 second confirmation time.
- Stellar Lumens is focussed on the developing world especially the multi-billion dollar industry of migrant workers who spend their hard-earned assets back to their family in under-developed countries.
9 – EOS
- EOS proposes improvements which can challenge Ethereum as the leading smart contract platform.
- EOS seeks to address the scalability problems in Ethereum network during times of high transaction volume.
- With Ethereum whenever you make an alteration or have an interaction with the system, you need to shell out a fee.
- With EOS, the creator of DAPP will pay the bill, while the user doesn’t pay anything.
- EOS also has a technical edge over Ethereum such as delegated proof of stake and other protocol changes. It was created by Dan Larrimer who is no stranger to blockchain or start-ups.
10 – Monero (XMR)
- Monero has been designed to be used as a completely anonymous payment system.
- A common misconception with Bitcoin is complete anonymity, but all the payments processed on the Bitcoin network are recorded on a public ledger.
- This Bitcoin is only partially anonymous, thus in theory, every transaction can be traced back.
- Though users can’t link the public key on the blockchain with the private keys used to store the coins themselves, there will always exist a correlation between the two.
- The problem has been solved by implementing cryptonic hashing of receiving addresses, thus separating coin from the address it is going to.
- It is hugely valuable for anyone wishing to conceal their purchases.
