The Ultimate List of All Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrency is a fast-moving world and research is crucial if you want to stay ahead of the game. Explore the ultimate list of all cryptocurrencies for a better understanding of the crypto world.
- By NFTExplained
- December 22, 2021
Let’s take a look at what terms like cryptocurrency and altcoin mean. A cryptocurrency, in its broadest sense, is a form of virtual or digital money in the form of tokens or “coins.” While some cryptocurrencies have entered the physical world through credit cards or other projects, the vast majority of cryptocurrencies remain completely intangible.
The term “crypto” refers to the complex cryptography that enables the creation and processing of digital currencies as well as their transactions across decentralized systems. A common commitment to decentralization goes hand in hand with this important “crypto” feature of these currencies; cryptocurrencies are typically developed as code by teams who build in mechanisms for issuance (often, but not always, through a process called mining) and other controls.
Cryptocurrencies are almost always designed to be immune to government manipulation and control, though this fundamental aspect of the industry has come under fire as it has grown in popularity. Let’s examine what cryptocurrencies exist
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the use of intermediaries. It has no central bank or single administrator. Network nodes use cryptography to verify transactions, which are then recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for an unknown person or group of people, created the cryptocurrency in 2008. When the currency’s implementation was released as open-source software in 2009, it was put into use. El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021.
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain that allows users to create smart contracts. The platform’s native cryptocurrency is Ether. Ether is the second most valuable cryptocurrency after Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization.
Vitalik Buterin, a programmer, created Ethereum in 2013. Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin were also among the Ethereum founders. Work on the network began in 2014 and was crowdfunded, with the network going live on July 30, 2015. Anyone can use the platform to deploy permanent and immutable decentralized applications that users can interact with.
NFTs, which are non-interchangeable tokens linked to digital works of art or other real-world items and sold as unique digital property, can also be created and exchanged on Ethereum. In addition, many other cryptocurrencies run on the Ethereum blockchain as ERC-20 tokens and have used the platform for initial coin offerings.
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system as a “joke” in response to the ferocious cryptocurrency speculation at the time. It’s known as the first “Meme coin” and, more specifically, the first “dog coin.” Despite its satirical nature, some people regard it as a viable investment opportunity.
Dogecoin’s logo and name are inspired by the Shiba Inu dog from the “Doge” meme. It was first released on December 6, 2013, and it quickly grew its own online community, eventually reaching a market capitalization of more than $85 billion on May 5, 2021. Watford of the Premier League’s current shirt sponsor.
Monero is a cryptocurrency that is decentralized. It achieves anonymity and fungibility by combining a public distributed ledger with privacy-enhancing technologies that obfuscate transactions. Addresses trading monero, transaction amounts, address balances, and transaction histories are all inaccessible to observers.
The protocol is open source and based on CryptoNote, a concept described by Nicolas van Saberhagen in a white paper published in 2013. Monero was created using this concept by the cryptography community, and its mainnet was launched in 2014. To obfuscate transaction details, Monero employs ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, “stealth addresses,” and Dandelion++. These features are built into the protocol, but users can share view keys with third parties for auditing purposes.
Monero, after bitcoin and Ethereum, has the third largest developer community among cryptocurrencies. Its privacy features have drawn cypherpunks and users looking for privacy features not available in other cryptocurrencies. Money laundering, darknet markets, ransomware, and cryptojacking are all examples of illegal activities where it is increasingly used.
LiteCoin (LTC) is a decentralized cryptocurrency based on bitcoin. It was one of the first altcoins – alternative BTC cryptocurrencies. Roughly speaking, lightcoin is a slightly recycled bitcoin, its fork. LTC appeared in 2011, when the first cryptocurrency was just two years old. The project was created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, who became interested in cryptocurrencies while working for the corporation.
It is built on bitcoin’s code and employs the same proof-of-work algorithm. It is limited to 21 million coins, just like bitcoin.
Namecoin has its own blockchain transaction database where it can store data. Namecoin’s original proposal called for it to directly insert data into bitcoin’s blockchain. A shared proof-of-work (POW) system was proposed to secure new cryptocurrencies with various use cases, anticipating scaling difficulties with this approach.
The censorship-resistant top level domain.bit, which is functionally similar to.com or.net domains but is independent of ICANN, the main governing body for domain names, is Namecoin’s flagship use case.
Peercoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that uses both proof-of-stake and proof-of-work systems. Peercoin is based on a paper published in August 2012 by Scott Nadal and Sunny King. A pseudonym for King, who also created Primecoin.The source code for Peercoin is released under the MIT/X11 software license.
Individuals’ holdings are used to generate new coins in the proof-of-stake system. To put it another way, someone who owns 1% of the currency will generate 1% of all proof-of-stake coin blocks. This increases the cost of a monopoly and distinguishes the risk of a monopoly from proof-of-work mining shares.
Gridcoin is an open source cryptocurrency that secures volunteer computing on the BOINC network, a distributed computing platform with over 30 science projects spanning a variety of scientific disciplines.
Rob Halförd created it on October 16, 2013. Gridcoin, like Peercoin, uses a proof of stake protocol to reduce the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining. This is in contrast to Bitcoin’s proof of work system. Gridcoin-Research is a fork of Bitcoin and Peercoin that is open-source and licensed under the MIT License.
The wallet’s user interface is built with Qt 5, and prebuilt executables are available for Windows, MacOS, and Debian.
Primecoin is a cryptocurrency that uses a proof-of-work system to look for prime number chains.
Primecoin was the first cryptocurrency to have a practical proof-of-work system when it was launched on July 7, 2013 by anonymous hacker and Peercoin founder Sunny King. Earlier cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, were mined using algorithms that solved arbitrary mathematical problems with no value or utility outside of mining the cryptocurrency.
Primecoin’s algorithm, on the other hand, computed prime number chains (Cunningham and bi-twin chains), the results of which were published on the blockchain’s public ledger, where scientists, mathematicians, and anyone else could use them. The use of a proof-of-work system to calculate prime number chains was a useful innovation that also met the criteria for a proof-of-work system: it involved a difficult calculation that was easy to verify, and the difficulty could be adjusted.
Ripple is a distributed open source protocol that supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodities, or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes. It was launched in 2012 and is based on a distributed open source protocol. Ripple claims to be able to facilitate “secure, instantaneous, and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks.” The native cryptocurrency XRP is used in the ledger.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ripple Labs and two of its executives in December 2020 for selling XRP tokens, which the SEC classified as unregistered securities.
NXT BCNext, an anonymous software developer, launched NXT, an open source cryptocurrency and payment network, in 2013. Proof-of-stake is used to reach consensus for transactions, resulting in a fixed money supply. There is no mining, unlike Bitcoin.NXT was created as a flexible platform for building applications and financial services, and it now serves as the foundation for ARDR (Ardor), a blockchain-as-a-service multi-chain platform developed by Jelurida, and IoTeX (cryptocurrency), which is the current steward of Nxt as of 2021. ESMA’s “Call for Evidence” report includes a lot of information about NXT.
Auroracoin is an Icelandic peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that was launched in February 2014 as a rival to bitcoin and the Icelandic króna. Baldur Friggjar is a pseudonym used by an unknown creator or creators (or Odinsson). They stated that starting on March 25, 2014, they planned to distribute half of all auroracoins ever created to all 330,000 people listed in Iceland’s national ID database for free, equating to 31.8 auroracoins per person.
Auroracoin was created as a counter-to-government restriction on Iceland’s króna, which have been in place since 2008 and severely restricts the currency’s movement outside the country.
Nano is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It’s a decentralized, open-source cryptocurrency with an Open Representative Voting (ORV) consensus mechanism and a directed acyclic graph (DAG) architecture. It uses a distributed ledger with a block-lattice data structure to operate without the use of intermediaries.
Colin LeMahieu launched Nano in October 2015 with the goal of addressing blockchain scalability issues that can result in high transaction confirmation times and restrictive fees.
It has feeless transactions that typically complete in less than one second.
Tether is a cryptocurrency that runs on the Ethereum blockchain and is backed by tokens issued by Tether Limited, which is controlled by Bitfinex’s owners. Tether is known as a stablecoin because it was created with the intention of always being worth $1.00, with $1.00 in reserves for each tether issue.
Cardano is a blockchain platform that is open to the public. It’s decentralized and open-source, with consensus achieved through proof of stake. Cardano was founded in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson and can facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its internal cryptocurrency. The Cardano Foundation, based in Zug, Switzerland, oversees and supervises the project’s development. It is the world’s largest cryptocurrency to run on a proof-of-stake blockchain, which is seen as a more environmentally friendly alternative to proof-of-work protocols.
TRON is a decentralized, open-source blockchain-based operating system with smart contract functionality, a consensus algorithm based on proof-of-stake principles, and a native cryptocurrency known as Tronix (TRX). It was founded in March 2014 by Justin Sun and has been overseen and supervised by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Singapore, since 2017. It started out as an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token before switching to its own blockchain in 2018.
Ambazonia’s official cryptocurrency is AmbaCoin. One AmbaCoin is worth 25 cents in US dollars, or about 140 CFA francs in CFA francs. It is said to be backed by the breakaway region’s rich natural resources. The AmbaCoin was launched in 2018, and the initial coin offering (ICO) took place from December 2018 to January 2019. All profits, according to the Ambazonian government, go towards their independence struggle and humanitarian aid.
BitClout, also known as DeSo (short for “Decentralized Social”), is a social media platform and open source cryptocurrency project. Users can buy and sell “creator coins” on the platform, which are based on people’s reputations. By clicking a diamond icon, users can also post short-form writings and photos, as well as award money to posts they particularly like. They can also sell non-ferrous metals.
The primary leader and founder of BitClout is Nader al-Naji, who goes by the pseudonym “diamondhands”.
In March 2021, BitClout became available to the general public. To prevent impersonation, it had 15,000 “reserved” accounts for celebrities on Twitter. BitClout changed its name to DeSo in September 2021.
SafeMoon is a cryptocurrency token that was launched on the Binance Smart Chain blockchain in March 2021.
The token charges a 10% transaction fee, with 5% of that fee being redistributed (or reflected) to token holders with 5% going to wallets in a different currency. Binance Coin (BNB), a liquidity pool controlled by the coin’s creators, was created to provide a solid price floor and cushion for holders
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