Cryptocurrencies are decentralized digital money based on blockchain technology. As an asset class, they are highly volatile and speculative. There are more than 5000 different cryptocurrencies in circulation. The above infographic presents the top ten cryptocurrencies in order of their market capitalization.

Bitcoin

The bitcoin invention goes back to 2008 when the domain name bitcoin.org was registered. It is said to be originated by a mysterious designer Satoshi Nakamoto who published an article “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System”. The first bitcoin transaction was done by S. Nakamoto while he sent 10bitcoins to a programmer.

It is one of the most volatile as well as the oldest cryptocurrency with highest market cap of $917.3bn, which is more than 50% of the entire market cap of the top 10 cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum

Ethereum was invented by a programmer named Vitalik Buterin in 2014 and it went live in July 2015. Technically speaking it is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality which makes it different from bitcoin.

Bitcoin trades in cryptos while Ethereum trades in cryptos, smart contracts and Ethereum Virtual Machine. Both of them use different algorithms. The average block time for Ethereum is just 12sec verses 10min in case of bitcoin, which allows miners to receive more Ethereum in lesser time.

At number 2 it possesses 26% of the entire market cap of the top 10 crypto currencies.

Binance Coin

Binance was created in 2017 by a developer named Changpeng Zhao in China. Binance is one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world in terms of daily trading volume. Binance coin can be traded in exchange for other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ether etc.

Binance gave almost 1800% returns in the first half of 2021. In terms of market cap, it is at number 3 with 5% of the total market cap of top 10 cryptos.

Tether

Originally tether was designed to always be worth $1, that’s why it is also called Stablecoin. It is a blockchain based cryptocurrency and is developed by the crypto exchange BitFinex. Tether is used by investors to avoid high volatility which is very common among cryptos like bitcoin.

It was specifically designed to provide stability, transparency and minimal transaction cost for investors but lately Tether went into a lot of controversies like in 2019, a NewYork Attorney General accused the parent company of Tether for hiding a loss of $850mn from investors.

It stands at spot 4 with 4.2% of the entire market cap of the top ten Cryptos.

Solana

Solana was invented by Anatoly Yakovenko in 2017. It is considered as one of the most performant blockchains in the world. It can support 50,000 transactions per second and has 400milliseconds block time which is faster than Ethereum as well as Bitcoin. Solana is said to have resolved several issues that earlier blockchain technologies experienced.

As a strong future competitor of Bitcoin and Ethereum, in terms of technology, it stands at number 5 and posses 3% of the total market cap of the top 10 cryptos.

XRP

Three engineers named David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto developed the XRP ledger in 2011. XRP was aimed at producing a better version of Bitcoin. Its goal was to provide a more sustainable digital asset for making payments.

Within a short period of time after its launch in June 2012, XRP was joined by Chris Larsen. The group started the company NewCoin which was later named as Ripple.

With a market cap of $47.3bn, XRP stands at number 6 with its 2.6% share amongst the top 10 by market cap.

Cardano

Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson as one of the co-founders, in 2015. The Cardano uses a protocol, proof-of-stake, which is different than the one used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. The protocol utilizes very less energy compared to proof-of-work protocol – used by the latter two.

Cardano is the largest amongst all Cryptos for using proof-of-stake protocol. It is considered ‘greener’ due to the above-mentioned reasons.

It stands at slot 7 with 2.5% share among the top 10 Cryptos by market cap.

USD Coin

USD Coin was founded in May 2018 and launched in September 2018. It is also a stablecoin and is managed by a consortium called ‘Circle’. Circle claims that each USDC is backed by a dollar held in reserve. In March 2021, Visa Inc. – An American Multinational Financial Corporation allowed to use USDC for making transactions on its payment network.

With its 2.3% share in the top 10 Cryptos by market cap, it stands at number 8.

Terra

Terra stands for The Trade Reference Currency. It was the Belgian economist, also an expert in monetary systems, named Bernard A. Lietaer who took the initiative to propose Terra in 2001. It is a stablecoin that track the price of fiat currencies such as USD or Euro etc.

Terra is traded with code name LUNA and has yielded a very healthy 12000% return from January 2021 till date. Within the top ten by market cap, it stands at number 9 with 1.8% share.

Avalanche

Avalanche was founded by Emin Gun Sirer – a Cornell University professor, Kevin Sekniqi and Maofan Ted Yin. This new startup was launched by Ava Labs in September 2020. Avalanche is said to be the fastest smart contract platform in the blockchain industry. It also uses proof-of-stake protocol, which utilizes less energy and hence greener compared to the ones that use proof-of-work.

On our list it is at number 10 with market cap of $29.7bn, which is 1.6% of the entire market cap of top 10 in the list.

That’s it for today. We will come back with more informative articles in the coming weeks.

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