Cryptocurrencies have emerged over time, and although they are not yet popular for everyday payments, they have become a new investment favorite in recent years, with even Tesla's founder Elon Musk endorsing them. With over 3,000 cryptocurrencies on the market today, it's not easy to find the ones with investment potential, so here are 7 of the better-known cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to become popular and is now the most widely known, with a market capitalization of over US$900 billion. Apple Pay has also recently allowed Bit Pay to be added to Apple Wallet for bitcoin payments.
Ethereum
Inspired by Bitcoin and then co-founded by Vitali Butlerin and Gavin Wood, Ethereum is a public blockchain platform with "smart contract" technology, and its dedicated cryptocurrency is Ether. Ether is now Bitcoin's biggest competitor, with a market capitalization of over US$170 billion, making it the world's second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and has enriched the blockchain platform by enabling different decentralized applications to run on Ether through smart contracts. However, Ether only supports one coding language, Solidity, which miners need to re-learn, making it more difficult to get started.
Dogecoin
Commonly known as Dogecoin, it was created in December 2013 by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus with the original intention of making a cryptocurrency that would be widely used by the public and not for speculation. The initial mintage of 100 billion was mined out in January 2015, with 5 billion being added each year since then. At the beginning of 2021, the value was only US$0.0047 per coin, but has now gone up to US$0.05. The value has risen to a high of US$0.08 per coin due to Tesla founder Max's bullish social media posts, making it a cryptocurrency that can be started without spending much money.
Ripple Credit
XRP for short. In 2012, the US company Open Coin created Ripple, an open payment network, and XRP is a cryptocurrency designed specifically for this network, with the aim of solving the problem of international payments, so XPR is characterized by fast transactions, with a transaction completed in seconds, and low transaction fees. However, it has obvious drawbacks, with 100 billion XRPs in total issue, 50 billion of which belong to the company behind Ripple, and is often criticized for being overly centralized and not having the core idea of decentralization behind cryptocurrencies.
Litecoin
Created in 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee who optimized and improved the Bitcoin blockchain, LTC is a pure cryptocurrency that takes 2.5 minutes for a single transaction, much faster than Bitcoin's 10-minute transaction time, and has cheaper transaction fees, but has no additional features, so it is often referred to as a streamlined version of Bitcoin. Although it is not outstanding, it has been in existence for 10 years now.
Tether
Tether, or USDT for short, was the first popular stable coin, which simply aims to reduce the risk of price fluctuations. While popular cryptocurrencies are not backed by real assets of value, the company issuing Tether boasts that Tether is equivalent to the US dollar, with one Tether equal to one US dollar, and for every Tether issued, its bank account will have a corresponding $1 in assets as margin to achieve a stable coin value. However, competition for stable coins is currently fierce and it is still hard to know which one will run out in the end before we see it.
Bitcoin Cash
BCH, for short, is a product that came out of a 'hard fork' of Bitcoin, when Bitcoin faced competition from other cryptocurrencies and a surge in trading volume that caused network congestion, so miners and Bitcoin holders proposed an upgrade to trading technology, but eventually disagreements arose, resulting in a hard fork of a brand-new coin, BCH.
