By cryptoadmin Top 11 Altcoins Shaping the Future of Crypto: From Ethereum to GraphLinq’s All-in-One Blockchain Platform
The term altcoin has come a long way from those very fledgling days of cryptocurrency, wherein only a handful of crypto assets existed. Anything that was not Bitcoin back then was an altcoin. But as the crypto space gets increasingly complex, so does this expanded definition.
Nowadays, the crypto ecosystem involves a wide range of coins and tokens that have many more functions than being simply a medium of exchange. Many altcoins could be serving purposes from enabling decentralized applications to powering whole blockchain ecosystems, and for that reason are not really competitors to Bitcoin.
Still, with all the growth of crypto assets, the general definition of an altcoin would probably be any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. Let’s dive deep into the top 11 altcoins by market capitalization, excluding stablecoins, designed just to maintain a stable value and usually not speculative investments.
- Ethereum (ETH) Market Cap: $323.76 billion
Ethereum leads the pack in the altcoin market, estimated to be over 300 billion dollars in value, powering thousands of different decentralized apps and smart contracts. While Bitcoin could be considered “decentralized currency,” Ethereum is a distributed computing network, offering a robust blockchain on top of which developers can build. While Ethereum has many complaints regarding high transaction fees, it remains indispensable in the world of crypto because it has a great ecosystem of apps and tokens built on top of it.
- Binance Coin (BNB) Market Cap: $81.00 billion
Binance Coin is a utility token that gives a discount in trading fees on the Binance exchange. It has also extended its use case beyond the exchange itself. Some of the things one can do with BNB include payment processing, making travel bookings among other uses.
Although it holds a well-liked coin, Binance Coin has equally faced its fair share of controversies with respect to centralization and was also put under the microscope by the SEC over its initial coin offering.
- Solana (SOL) Market Cap: $73.68 billion
Solana is a high-throughput blockchain using a novel blend of proof-of-stake and proof-of-history consensus models. It is designed to facilitate the building of decentralized finance applications and smart contracts in an extremely easy and amicable way, unlike many other platforms.
- XRP (XRP) Market Cap: $33.05 billion
XRP was developed by Ripple Labs and allows for speed cross-border settlements, allowing various currencies on it to be traded. With very negligible transaction fees, XRP faces legal challenges. Ripple and its executives have bartered a lawsuit with the SEC over whether XRP should have been classified as ‘security’.
- GraphLinq (GLQ) Market Cap: $15.46 billion
GraphLinq is going to change the face of blockchain. This is an all-in-one platform that’s offering a DEX-a product with its own automated market maker. GLQ Chain layer-1 blockchain is not only offering extremely low transaction costs, which are a precondition for mass adoption, but it also provides a no-code IDE with which users will easily build DApps just by dragging and dropping elements into place.
In addition, the blockchain explorer comes with the place-and-track of transactions within GraphLinq Chain, while an AI assistant even helps to automate and create these workflows with better ease within Web3.
- Cardano – ADA
Market Cap: $13.25 billion
Cardano was among the first to implement the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that minimized energy consumption when chain transactions were at higher speed. It also introduced functions for smart contracts on its blockchain, allowing developers to deploy their applications directly on Cardano.
- Toncoin (TON)
Market Cap: $13.68 billion
Toncoin is a layer-1 blockchain that was developed by Telegram and allows for speedy trades within its application ecosystem. Coming out as a project that enabled the facilitation of in-app payments for the messaging app, it later grew to provide full-scale community-driven blockchain with proof-of-stake mechanisms for fast transaction validation.
- Avalanche (AVAX)
Market Cap: $10.75 billion
Avalanche aims to compete directly with Ethereum in efforts toward scaling, security, and decentralization through its innovative use of interoperable three blockchains. Mailing high throughput in transaction processing, Avalanche has gained a spot as one of the ultimate preferences for the developer community in building decentralized applications.
- Shiba Inu (SHIB)
Market Cap: $8.69 billion The Shiba Inu is a meme coin that has evolved into a decentralized community-driven token. Based on Ethereum, SHIB has an ecosystem currently in development featuring a DEX and a companion suite of DeFi projects.
- Polkadot (DOT)
Market Cap: $6.86 billion
Polkadot is a blockchain platform that connects a number of other blockchains together for interoperability, sharing information, and even facilitating transactions in a trustless way. With Polkadot, by developing on the platform, users can build purpose-specific blockchains that will link up to the central Polkadot hub.
- Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
Market Cap: $6.81 billion
Atomically created as a hard fork in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash is planned to be even more scalable and transaction-friendly than its predecessor. It focuses on electronic cash, peer-to-peer transactions, putting into one single goal the decentralized payment system that is permissionless and open to all users anywhere.”