10 most popular crypto currencies.
As the market is evolving at a rapid pace, I thought it could be useful to share my vision on existing cryptocurrecies. The number of crypto currencies available over the Internet as of 27 November 2017 is over 1324 and growing. New crypto currencies are created all the time.
Historical facts:
Let’s trace a subject back to its core. The crypto revolution started in 2009 at the nadir of the financial crisis with appearance of Bitcoin — the first decentralized cryptocurrency. The word “bitcoin” was defined in the white paper that was published on 31 October 2008. It is a compound of the words bit and coin.
On 18 August 2008, the domain name “bitcoin.org” was registered. In November the same year, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list. Nakamoto implemented the bitcoin software as open source code and released it in January 2009. In January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence after Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first ever block on the chain, known as the genesis block, for a reward of 50 bitcoins.
I picked ten cryptocurrencies from over 1300 (in no specific order) that could be worth of your time. Here’s a short infographic for you to enjoy before turning to a detailed long-read.
1) Bitcoin (BTC)
Bitcoin has not just been a trendsetter, ushering in a wave of cryptocurrencies built on decentralized peer-to-peer network, it has become de facto standard for cryptocurrencies.
As expected Bitcoin is in the top of the list and now is trading at $15,325,30, while it’s market capitalization stands at $256,911,796,670. In fact, this year Bitcoin has risen in value 1,000% year-to-date. On 1 August 2017, a hard fork of bitcoin was created, known as Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash has a larger blocksize limit and had an identical blockchain at the time of fork.
2) Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin, launched in the year 2011, was among the initial cryptocurrencies following bitcoin and was often referred to as ‘silver to Bitcoin’s gold.’ It was created by Charlie Lee, a MIT graduate and former Google engineer. Litecoin has a large amount of tokens and is based on an open source global payment network that is not controlled by any central authority and uses new unique mining algorithm “scrypt” as a proof of work, which can be decoded with the help of CPUs of consumer grade. Litecoin has fast block generation rate and hence offers a fast transaction confirmation. Litecoin is an open source pear-to-pear digital currency and the market cap is $15,342,728,118 with a value of around $281,63 for 1 Litecoin.
Litecoin is one of the more stable-priced coins on the market. Some even believe it will one day overtake Bitcoin as the “Crypto King” making it a very popular cryptocurrency throughout the community.
3) Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum, the second after Bitcoin biggest cryptocurrency in the world in terms of the market capitalization, now is changing hands at $767,66, while its market capitalization accounts for $74,140,496,910.
Created by 19 year old math-prodigy Vitalik Buterin and launched in 2015, Ethereum is a decentralized software platform that enables Smart Contracts and Distributed Applications (ĐApps) to be built and run without any downtime, fraud, control or interference from a third party. During 2014, Ethereum had launched a pre-sale for ether which had received an overwhelming response. The applications on Ethereum are run on its platform-specific cryptographic token, ether. Following the attack on the DAO in 2016, Ethereum was split into Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). Ethereum has surpassed Bitcoin in terms of the number of transactions.
More companies and corporate giants become involved with Ethereum everyday: Microsoft, Mastercard, BP, Intel, Samsung, JP Morgan, Toyota, Cisco, Consensys, National Bank of Canada, and Scotiabank to name a few.
4) Zcash (ZEC)
Zcash is a decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency launched in the 2016. Zcash offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. Zcash claims to provide extra security or privacy where all transactions are recorded and published on a blockchain, but details such as the sender, recipient, and amount remain private.
One of Zcash’s biggest sell points is its fungibility: one ZEC will always be absolutely identical to and interchangable with any other ZEC, opposed to bitcoins for example who’s data coding change with every transaction. It is possible to identify a single bitcoin based on it’s track record, this is impossible to do with a ZEC.
Zcash operates on something known as “zero-knowledge proofs”. Zero-knowledge proofs allow users to encrypt both the sending and receiving addresses as well as the amount of funds in the transaction. The Zcash Blockchain is able to verify the legitimacy of these transactions without ever deciphering the encrypted data, providing both the extreme accuracy and trust associated with blockchains, as well as the data privacy of encryption technology. The market cap of Zcash is $1,634,853,160 with a value of around $560, 12 for a unit.
ZCash is a favorite among miners as it has remained more profitable than most of the other altcoins, due largely in part to it’s 2.5 minute average “block time”, 2mb block-size, and 12.5 ZEC per mined-block reward.
5) Dash
Launched in January 2014, Dash (originally known as Darkcoin and Xcoin) is open peer-to-peer currency. Dash offers more anonymity as it works on a decentralized mastercode network that makes transactions almost untraceably. This cryptocurrency was created and developed by Evan Duffield and can be mined using a CPU or GPU.
In March 2015, ‘Darkcoin’ was rebranded to Dash, which stands for Digital Cash and operates under the ticker — DASH. The rebranding didn’t change any of its technological features such as Darksend, InstantX.
Dash has a market cap of around $9,327,441,594 at the time we wrote this outlook. One dash costs $1,199,49. Dash is one of the fastest transacting cryptocurrencies around and it’s “Instasend” and “Privasend” features have even more functionality for a higher transaction fee, making it an ideal cryptocurrency in a retail setting.
To make things better, Dash has partnered with multiple companies to implement a “crypto-to-fiat” debit card that you can use to make purchases anywhere you could normally use a debit card.
6) Ripple (XRP)
Ripple is a real-time global settlement network that offers instant, certain and low-cost international payments. Released in 2012, Ripple has a market cap of $43,186,398,675. You can buy one unit with a price of around $1,11.
Ripple is one of the most bullied blockchain projects in the cryptocurrency community. While Ripple has many benefits associated with blockchains and cryptocurrencies, it lacks one fundamental element that truly drives blockchain supporters: Decentralization.
Ripple Labs created every XRP token there ever will be, meaning the currency cannot be “mined” or earned “de-centrally”; Ripple Labs holds every XRP in existence outside of the ones they have allocated to the various corporations using Ripple.
7) Monero (XMR)
Launched in April 2014, Monero is a secure, private and untraceable currency. The development of this cryptocurrency is completely donation-based and community-driven. Monero has been launched with a strong focus on decentralization and scalability, and enables complete privacy by using a special technique called ‘ring signatures. The popularity of Monero is growing extremely quickly. The market cap of Monero is $5,755,549,942 with a value of around $370,71 for a unit.
Monero is the most prominent example of the CryptoNight algorithm. This algorithm was invented to add multiple privacy features not seen in most cryptocurrencies and was born from the CryptoNote privacy protocol.
CryptoNight algorithm makes impossible to track any kind of processed transactions between addresses, or even determine the amount of funds held in an address, as is possible with Bitcoin.
8) IOTA (MIOTA)
This cryptocurrency is concentrated on Machine-to-Machine transactions. Its key purpose is to enable M2M payments via serving the machine economy.
IOTA uses the special new concept called the tangle: a new blockless distributed ledger which is scalable, lightweight and makes it possible to transfer value without any fees. Contrary to today’s Blockchains, consensus is no-longer decoupled but instead an intrinsic part of the system, leading to decentralized and self-regulating peer-to-peer network. IOTA has a market capitalization of $2,133,859,296 while you can get one IOTA for $0.7677.
9) NEO
Formerly Antshares, NEO is a non-profit community project which utilizes blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets, to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, and to realize a “smart economy” with a distributed network NEO has a market capitalization of $4,142,144,500 while you can get one NEO for $63,73.
NEO focuses on “smart-contracts”: conditional agreements set in code into the blockchain ensuring everything once agreed upon happens as intended.
10) NEM
NEM was launched in the March 2015 and runs in Java platform. The market cap of NEM is $8,508,374,999. Meanwhile, you can get one NEM for $0,945375. NEM is a peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency platform. The initial plan for NEM was started by a Bitcoin Talk forum user called UtopianFuture who wanted to upgrade on the Nxt platform.
NEM has since partnered with one of Japan’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges “Zaif” which led to a partnership with Mijin, a Japanese “private blockchain” powerhouse.
The NEM/Majin platform has spam-protection: upon spam-node detection, the network specifically raises that node’s transaction costs.
The Japanese government’s legalization of Bitcoin led to a national surge in blockchain interests and initiatives and NEM has quickly become one of the most endorsed blockchain platforms in Japan.
Conclusions
Bitcoin continues to lead the pack of cryptocurrencies, in terms of market capitalization, user base and popularity. Nevertheless, virtual currencies such as Ethereum and Ripple which are being used more for enterprise solutions are becoming popular, while some altcoins are being endorsed for superior or advanced features vis-à-vis Bitcoins. Going by the current trend, cryptocurrencies are here to stay but how many of them will emerge leaders amid the growing competition within the space will only be revealed with time.
These can also be considered as promising crypto currencies in 2018 : Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Cash, Siacoin, Stratis, Golem, Factom, Lisk, Qtum, OmiseGo.
