Guide to DeFi: Tokens & Altcoins

Hello! We decided to create an extensive and useful guide for those who are just starting their crypto journey. Have you tried to look into the world beyond bitcoins and ethereum? It’s fun and completely accessible.

Since Bitcoin began to take off, there have been thousands of alternatives. In the past few years, tokens that help support decentralized finance (or DeFi) protocols have become increasingly popular.

If you’re ready to understand the difference between OXT and MATIC, you’ve come to the right place. Today we will look at Cardano, Solana and Dogecoin, and read about the rest of the currencies in the continuation of our guide in the following posts. Each of these “altcoins” (short for “alternative coins”) is traded through every major exchange and has unique features, purposes, and use cases.

Have a nice trip to the tempting world of altcoins!

Solana (SOL)

Released: February, 2018

Ethereum. Like Ethereum, Solana is both a cryptocurrency and a flexible platform for running crypto applications, from NFT projects like Degenerate Apes to Serum decentralized exchange (or DEX).

Its main innovation is speed. Solana can process about 50,000 transactions per second — compared to 15 or less for Ethereum.

Solana’s native cryptocurrency is SOL. It is used to pay transaction fees and for staking. It also serves as a “governance token”, which means owners can also vote on future updates and governance proposals that are submitted by the Solana community.

Like Ethereum, Solana is a computing platform that can interact with smart contracts. Smart contracts support a wide range of applications, from NFT and DeFi markets to games and decentralized lotteries.

One of the reasons a user might choose an app running on Solana rather than, say, Ethereum is because the speed is fast and the congestion is low, resulting in very low fees.

Cardano (ADA)

Released: September 2017

Cardano was developed as an evolution of the birth idea of ​​Ethereum. It may well become a flexible, resilient and scalable platform for running smart contracts, enabling a wide range of decentralized finance applications, new crypto tokens, games and more.

Cardano’s native cryptocurrency is ADA, which can be used to store, raise funds, and receive payments, as well as to place payments and transaction fees on the Cardano network.

Cardano’s goal is to become the most environmentally sustainable platform. It uses a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism called Ouroboros, as opposed to the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work system currently used by Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Dogecoin (DOGE)

Released: December 2013

For most of its existence, Dogecoin (pronounced “dohj coin”) was seen as a fun “memecoin” loved by the community but with relatively little value.

That changed in 2021 when DOGE became one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization — with a total value in excess of $50 billion, although each individual coin is worth a penny.

Abundance is a key part of the idea — Dogecoin was created as a fun, low-stakes alternative to Bitcoin. As soon as it was launched in late 2013, it began to attract an enthusiastic online community, known to have once used DOGE to help send the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Keep in mind: unlike Bitcoin, which is designed to be scarce and inflation resistant, Dogecoin was designed to be plentiful. There are about 130 billion DOGE in circulation, and miners are producing another 10,000 every minute.