The best cryptocurrencies, prevailing in the market, aren’t just currencies, they’re basically a native’s assets to a number of startups and projects.
Mark Cuban and Andreessen Horowitz have been known widely for their heavy investment in altcoins, specifically decentralized finance (DeFi) investments, popularly known as crypto investments.
The king of all cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, was 1st and also the most well-known cryptocurrency on the market.
It also benefits from the largest market cap and is among the foremost highly traded cryptocurrencies, assuring liquidity to investors.
Bitcoin is that the king when it involves retail and institutional adoption.
Most of the altcoins tend to follow Bitcoin’s price trend. Thus, in the case of Bitcoin does poorly, altcoins are likely to bleed as well.
Considering the worth of bitcoin is down 50% from its all-time highs of over $64,000, buying now is also an honest investment for the longer term.
There are only 21 million bitcoins existing and from that, about 15% is expected of being lost. Thus, as long as Bitcoin’s user base continues to grow, its worth will also increase rapidly.
The original, and (for now) the most important by capitalization.
It had been launched in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for the mysterious person or group who created it, to secure payments across a peer-to-peer network.
Bitcoin aims to eliminate the requirement for a trusted third party, democratise money and make sure that transactions are anonymous.
Biggest pro: Best known cryptocurrency
Biggest con: Slow transaction speeds, the requirement of specialist mining equipment.
Ether is basically the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, which enables users to code and release their own ‘decentralised applications (dapps)’ and make ‘smart’ contracts that automatically enforce their clauses.
Small amounts of ether get destroyed during the procession of a transaction, thereby preventing hackers from spamming the network.
As the currency and platform that made smart contracts a part of the cryptocurrency market’s vocabulary, Ethereum has seen massive gains since its introduction in 2015.
Currently, only behind Bitcoin in respect to capitalisation, Ethereum has become one of all the foremost widely discussed cryptocurrency projects within the world.
A consortium of some of the largest names within the business, consisting of Microsoft, Intel, Chase, and J.P.
Morgan have been constantly working on building business-ready versions of the software, which is derived using Ethereum.
With the amount of momentum and market enthusiasm, being involved with the Ethereum project, there’s tends to be no reason for having Ethereum in the cryptocurrency portfolio
Ethereum is offered on Coinbase, Gemini and Voyager.
Biggest pro: Used other than cryptocurrency, fast transaction speeds Biggest con: Uncapped supply may lead to an inflationary situation.
Polygon is an Ethereum sidechain that’s scaling DeFi at a rapid rate. Ethereum’s high gas fees have highlighted the network’s struggle to upgrade to Eth2.
The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, expressed his support in the development of the Layer 2 scaling solutions, which is expected to handle transactions on a side chain before submitting a batch of transactions to Ethereum’s layer 1 blockchain.
As a result, users are expected to pay significantly lesser transaction fees, as compared to other currencies.
Layer 2 sidechains play a critical role in scaling Ethereum, and Polygon is one of the first to try it.
Assets must be bridged to the sidechain, so there are some switching costs that will cause people to stay on Polygon for the long term.
Polygon is out there on Coinbase, Gemini, and Binance.US.
Stellar may be a payment network that operates in a similar thanks to Ripple Net and might process transactions in multiple currencies.
it’s underpinned by a cryptocurrency called lumens (XLM), which is usually mentioned as ‘stellar’ (including on the IG platform).
Lumens is generally used for the purpose of making payments on the network, however, the same play an anti-spam role, since each transaction requires a small transaction fee, which is purchased using cryptocurrency.
Stellar Lumens diverges from much of its cryptocurrency competitors in an exceeding number of ways. Its goal is to be the go-to cryptocurrency for payments, using technology that permits quick and cheap transactions.
The project aims to permit retail and institutional investors to send digital representations of all sorts of money.
Using this technology, users would be able to send XLM, and at the same time, the network also allows its users to send Bitcoin and fiat currencies around the world.
Stellar has been made available on Coinbase and Gemini.
Biggest pro: Integrated payment system with banks, and also helps in processing transactions in multiple currencies Biggest con: Cryptocurrency is not as widely recognized as some other
Cardano is one of all Ethereum’s largest competitors. The project was founded by Charles Hoskinson, one of Ethereum’s past co-founders.
The cryptocurrency is already proof-of-stake, a consensus algorithm that Ethereum remains in the process of migrating over to.
Proof-of-Stake doesn’t only yield faster and cheaper transactions, but it’s also environmentally friendly.
Cardano has yet to release smart contracts on its platform, but the cryptocurrency plans to feature this feature in 2021.
Ethereum already has many decentralized applications on its platform, and therefore the network has more users than Cardano’s. Cardano is on the market on Coinbase and Gemini.
Chainlink (LINK) is an Ethereum token, which empowers the Chainlink decentralized oracle network.
Such a network allows for the making of smart contracts on Ethereum to securely connect with external data sources.
Chainlink entered the crypto market in the year 2014 and was known as SmartContract.com.
Just after its launch, its name got changed to Chainlink in order to represent its core market. Chainlink founded a strategic partnership with Google in 2019.
This move was seen as a serious win by investors because it allows users to attach to Google’s 2 preferred cloud services
NEO (NEO)
NEO is that the name of both the cryptocurrency and therefore the network it runs on. This network is like Ethereum therein it enables users to form decentralized apps and smart contracts.
However, NEO is unique due to its network, is tightly controlled by the ‘NEO Team’, which requires its users to own a verifiable identity on the network.
Biggest pro: Integration with the NEO network, as in compliance with the regulations.
Biggest con: Might not be truly decentralized
Bitcoin cash (BCH)
Bitcoin cash could be a standalone digital currency, created as an offshoot of bitcoin in August 2017 by a ‘hard fork’.
It was introduced, in order to overcome the slowdown in bitcoin transaction speeds and the network’s inability to succeed in consensus upgrades.
Bitcoin cash’s maximum block size is expected to be around 8mb, which is quite higher than that of bitcoin, enabling the processing of transactions at a pretty higher speed.
Biggest pro: Faster transaction times than bitcoin
Biggest con: Requires specialist mining equipment
EOS (EOS)
EOS is basically the cryptocurrency of EOS.IO, a blockchain platform that’s said to replicate the key functionality of a computer’s hardware and software.
It provides tools and services for developers to make apps, including user accounts, authentication and databases. Responsibility for processing and other operations is distributed across the network, which its designers claim will enable it to scale to millions of transactions per second within the future.
Biggest pro: Integration with the EOS.IO network, along with fast transaction speeds.
Biggest con: Uncapped supply means it might be inflationary
Ripple (XRP)
Ripple could be a cryptocurrency that underpins a payment network called Ripple Net – employed by major banks and financial institutions including Santander and American Express.
Ripple operated quite differently, thanks to the other digital currencies, which has raised questions against its credentials as a real decentralized cryptocurrency.
Biggest pro: Lightning-fast transaction speeds
Biggest con: Ripple Net is often used without its underlying cryptocurrency, ripple
Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin is meant to be ‘silver to bitcoin’s gold’, per its founder Charlie Lee.
And even as the availability of silver outstrips the availability of gold, Litecoin’s maximum supply of 84 million coins is fourfold greater than bitcoins.
There also are some fundamental technological differences between the two.
Biggest pro: fast transaction speeds
Biggest con: low capitalization compared to bitcoin
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