Bitcoin (BTC) is a cryptocurrency, a virtual currency designed to act as money and a form of payment outside the control of any one person, group, or entity, thus removing the need for third-party involvement in financial transactions. It is rewarded to blockchain miners for the work done to verify transactions and can be purchased on several exchanges.

Bitcoin was introduced to the public in 2009 by an anonymous developer or group of developers using the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

It has since become the most well-known cryptocurrency in the world. Its popularity has inspired the development of many other cryptocurrencies. These competitors either attempt to replace it as a payment system or are used as utility or security tokens in other blockchains and emerging financial technologies.

At its core, Ethereum is a decentralized global software platform powered by blockchain technology. It is most commonly known for its native cryptocurrency, ether (ETH).

Ethereum can be used by anyone to create any secured digital technology. It has a token designed to pay for work done supporting the blockchain, but participants can also use it to pay for tangible goods and services if accepted.

Ethereum is designed to be scalable, programmable, secure, and decentralized. It is the blockchain of choice for developers and enterprises creating technology based upon it to change how many industries operate and how we go about our daily lives.

Created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, Litecoin was one of the first “altcoins”—a name given to cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin (and sometimes other than Ethereum).

“Litecoin is the second-oldest cryptocurrency, forked from the Bitcoin protocol in 2011,” says Jay Blaskey, digital currency specialist at BitIRA. “It was engineered to be used for fast, secure and low-cost payments.” Think of it as a Bitcoin spinoff.

The goal in launching Litecoin was to improve on Bitcoin in a few different ways. For one, Lee developed a new hashing algorithm for Litecoin called Scrypt (pronounced S-crypt). The simpler algorithm supported Litecoin’s faster transaction speeds. Bitcoin has a slow transaction processing speed of roughly five transactions per second. Generating new blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain can take about 10 minutes.

This slow transaction speed frustrates merchants who want to accept Bitcoin as payment. You can wait up to an hour, on average, for the six confirmations required for a Bitcoin transaction. Imagine buying something online using a credit card and being on that “your transaction is processing” screen for an entire hour.

Litecoin’s transaction processing speed, on the other hand, is 54 per second—and new blocks on the Litecoin blockchain can be created about every 2.5 minutes. While Litecoin still requires a minimum of six confirmations from most exchanges to be considered irreversible, peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto payment networks can often settle Litecoin transactions almost immediately.

The improved transaction speed was meant to prove to merchants that they no longer had to be frustrated by Bitcoin’s long settlement time. Instead, they could accept Litecoin and settle payments faster and, therefore, conduct business more quickly and at speeds more on par with other digital payment methods.

Tether (USDT) is a popular stablecoin that crypto enthusiasts have used for years to leverage their cryptocurrency trades.

USDT is pegged to the U.S. dollar, and in theory it should be unaffected by the market volatility that can so dramatically impact the valuation of other cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.

Tether Is a Stablecoin

Tether aims to provide a “safe” digital asset that maintains a stable valuation. That’s what makes USDC a stablecoin, whose value is pegged to the price of the U.S. dollar. The goal is that Tether should always maintain the same value as its peg.

“The idea is that 1 Tether can always be traded for $1, regardless of market conditions,” says Steve Bumbera, chief operating officer of Many Worlds Token.

Tether’s stablecoin competitors include USD Coin (USDC), Dai (DAI) and Pax Dollar (USDP), to name a few.

Crypto traders use Tether to provide steady, reliable liquidity to get in and out of other cryptocurrency trades without facing unpredictable losses (or gains) from volatile price changes.

Tether had a 24-hour trading volume of $89 billion at the time of this writing. That makes Tether the most liquid cryptocurrency—beating even crypto market stalwarts Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). It’s also among the top three largest cryptos by market capitalization.

Ripple is a money transfer network designed to serve the needs of the financial services industry. XRP is the native cryptocurrency on the Ripple network, and it consistently lists among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Ripple is the company behind XRP, and it’s a payment settlement system and currency exchange network that can process transactions globally.

“Ripple was designed from the very beginning to essentially be a replacement for SWIFT (a leading money transfer network) or to otherwise replace the settlement layer between major financial institutions,” says Pat White, CEO of Bitwave.

It serves as a trusted agent between two parties in a transaction as the network can quickly confirm that the exchange went through properly. Ripple can facilitate exchanges for a variety of fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, to name one example.

Whenever users make a transaction using the network, the network deducts a small amount of XRP, a cryptocurrency, as a fee.

“The standard fee to conduct transactions on Ripple is set at 0.00001 XRP, which is minimal compared to the large fees charged by banks for conducting cross-border payments,” says El Lee, board member of Onchain Custodian.

XRP is a cryptocurrency that runs on the XRP Ledger, a blockchain engineered by Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto and David Schwartz. McCaleb and Britto would go on to found Ripple and use XRP to facilitate transactions on the network.

You can buy XRP as an investment, as a crypto to exchange for other cryptocurrencies or as a way to finance transactions on the Ripple network.

Notably, XRP’s blockchain operates a little differently than most other cryptos. Other cryptocurrencies open their transaction ledgers and verification processes to anyone who can solve complex equations quickly. But transactions are secure as the majority of ledger holders must agree with the verification for them to be added.

XRP’s Ripple network somewhat centralizes things and uses a consensus protocol: While anyone can download its validation software, it maintains unique node lists that users can select to verify their transactions based on which participants they think are least likely to defraud them.

As new transactions come in, the validators update their ledgers every three to five seconds and make sure they match the other ledgers. If there’s a mismatch, they stop to figure out what went wrong. This allows the network to securely and efficiently validate transactions, which gives it an edge over other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

“Bitcoin transaction confirmations may take many minutes or hours and are typically associated with high transaction costs,” says Lee. “XRP transactions are confirmed around four to five seconds at a much lower cost.”

Tron is a blockchain-based decentralized digital platform with its own cryptocurrency, called Tronix or TRX. Founded in 2017 by a Singapore non-profit organization, the Tron Foundation, Tron aims to host a global entertainment system for the cost-effective sharing of digital content.

Initially marketed primarily in Asia, Tron had now gone global. The platform had more than 50 million accounts as of August 2021.

Founded by Justin Sun, now its CEO, Tron has offices in Singapore and San Francisco. Born in 1990, Sun also is the CEO of BitTorrent, the file-sharing program.

• Tron is a blockchain-based digital platform that primarily hosts entertainment applications.
• It has its own in-house cryptocurrency, called Tronix or TRX.
• TRX ranks 31st among cryptocurrencies in market capitalization.

Tron uses the features of the blockchain and peer-to-peer (P2P) network technology to eliminate the middleman and allow content creators to sell their work directly to consumers. Software developers use the Solidity programming language to create apps that are hosted on the Tron platform.

The currency used on the network is Tronix, or TRX. Users of the network use TRX to directly pay the content creators to access their applications. Content creators do not pay a transaction fee to Tron. (TRX transactions also are free on the platform.)

Users can store their crypto-assets in a desktop, mobile, or hardware wallet.

Cardano (ticker symbol, ADA) is a decentralized proof of stake (PoS) blockchain designed to be a more efficient alternative to proof of work (PoW) networks.

Cardano's cryptocurrency is named Ada after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), who is commonly regarded as the first computer programmer. Ada is used in the blockchain's PoS consensus mechanism. It is given as a reward for work done for the blockchain by users participating in a stake pool.

• Cardano is a blockchain platform that was founded in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson. It was launched in 2017.
• Cardano aims to be a decentralized application (DApp) development platform with a multi-asset ledger and verifiable smart contracts.
• Cardano runs on the proof-of-stake Ouroboros consensus protocol.
• The primary cryptocurrency of Cardano is called "Ada."
• Cardano oversight is decentralized and shared by the Cardano Foundation, IOHK, and EMURGO.

Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Ethereum, began the development of Cardano in 2015 and launched the platform in 2017.5 Cardano has positioned itself as an alternative to Ethereum. Both platforms are used for similar applications, such as smart contracts, and have goals of building a connected and decentralized system.

Cardano considers itself an updated version of Ethereum and has anointed itself a "third-generation" platform, compared with Ethereum’s "second-generation" credentials. The blockchain platform also has a goal of providing banking services to the world’s unbanked.

The Cardano platform runs on the Ouroboros consensus protocol. Ouroboros, created by Cardano in its foundation phase, is the first proof of stake (PoS) protocol designed to reduce the energy expenditure required by proof of work (PoW) mining. It does this by eliminating the massive computing resources that the proof of work algorithm uses.

There are currently two major consensus mechanisms that cryptocurrencies use to verify transactions. Proof of work, which is used by Bitcoin, requires users to solve complex cryptographic puzzles before they are added to the blockchain. This is also known as cryptocurrency mining. Proof of stake, the other major consensus mechanism, is more energy-efficient because it does not rely on crypto mining. Instead, it relies on multiple random validators to agree that a transaction is accurate before it is added to the blockchain.

Dogecoin (DOGE) is a peer-to-peer, open-source cryptocurrency. It is considered an altcoin and was launched in December 2013 with the image of a Shiba Inu dog as its logo. Dogecoin's blockchain has merit with its underlying technology derived from Litecoin. Notable features of Dogecoin, which uses a scrypt algorithm, are its low price and unlimited supply.

• Dogecoin is an open-source cryptocurrency established in 2013 by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus.
• Dogecoin features a Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed of dog, as its logo.
• It is based on Litecoin and uses the same proof-of-work technology.
• Dogecoin has a loyal community of supporters who trade it and use it as a tipping currency for social media content.

Dogecoin began as a whim but quickly gained a following. By late 2017, it was participating in the cryptocurrency bubble that increased digital coin value significantly.

With losses in 2018, Dogecoin lost much of its value but continues to have a core of supporters who trade it and use it to tip for content on Twitter and Reddit.

Users can buy and sell Dogecoin on digital currency exchanges. They can opt to store their Dogecoin on an exchange or in a Dogecoin wallet.

Jackson Palmer, a product manager at the Sydney, Australia, office of Adobe Inc., created Dogecoin in 2013 as a way to satirize the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies. After receiving positive feedback and interest on social media, he bought the domain dogecoin.com.

Billy Markus, a software developer at IBM, desired to create a digital currency but had trouble promoting his efforts. Markus teamed with Palmer to build the software behind an actual Dogecoin.

Markus based Dogecoin's code on Luckycoin, derived from Litecoin, and initially used a randomized reward for block mining, although that was changed to a static reward in March 2014. Dogecoin uses Litecoin's scrypt technology and is a Proof-of-Work (PoW) coin.

Palmer and Markus launched the coin on Dec. 6, 2013. Two weeks later on Dec. 19, the value of Dogecoin jumped 300%, bolstered by China's policy to forbid its banks from investing in cryptocurrency.

Polygon is a cryptocurrency, with the symbol MATIC, and also a technology platform that enables blockchain networks to connect and scale. Polygon—"Ethereum's internet of blockchains"— launched under the name Matic Network in 2017.

The Polygon platform operates using the Ethereum blockchain and connects Ethereum-based projects. Using the Polygon platform can increase the flexibility, scalability, and sovereignty of a blockchain project while still affording the security, interoperability, and structural benefits of the Ethereum blockchain.

MATIC is an ERC-20 token, meaning that it's compatible with other Ethereum-based digital currencies. MATIC is used to govern and secure the Polygon network and to pay network transaction fees.

• The Polygon platform, powered by the MATIC token, was launched to connect and grow Ethereum-compatible projects and blockchains.
• MATIC tokens are used to govern and secure the Polygon network and pay transaction fees.
• Polygon uses a modified proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to efficiently operate the platform.

Polygon uses a modified proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that enables a consensus to be achieved with every block. (Achieving consensus using traditional proof-of-stake requires processing many blocks to achieve consensus.) The proof-of-stake method requires network participants to stake—agree to not trade or sell—their MATIC, in exchange for the right to validate Polygon network transactions. Successful validators in the Polygon network are rewarded with MATIC.

The Polygon network, as a secondary scaling solution, aims to address the limitations of the Ethereum platform—namely high transaction fees and slow transaction processing speeds. Polygon can:

• Deploy existing blockchain networks and develop custom blockchains
• Enable communication between Ethereum and other blockchains
• Help existing blockchain networks to become compatible with Ethereum

Polygon was co-founded by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic. The platform now supports over 7,000 blockchain-based projects.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Polygon

You may be wondering about the major strengths and weaknesses of Polygon. Especially if you are considering buying MATIC, keep reading to understand Polygon's advantages and disadvantages.

Polygon's strengths include:

• Ability to process transactions quickly: By using a consensus mechanism that completes the transaction confirmation process in a single block, Polygon can maintain fast transaction processing speeds. Polygon's average block processing time is 2.1 seconds.
• Transaction fees are consistently low: Polygon keeps its fees to use the platform low, with a typical transaction fee of around $0.01.

Among Polygon's weaknesses are:

• Not an autonomous blockchain: Polygon is a Layer 2 solution that works atop the Ethereum platform. If the Ethereum platform experiences serious disruptions or ceases to exist, then Polygon would likely lose its value.
• Limited use cases for MATIC: The MATIC token is designed to govern and secure the Polygon platform and pay transaction fees. Unlike some digital currencies, MATIC is not generally used for everyday purchases.

Binance Coin is the cryptocurrency issued by Binance exchange and trades with the BNB symbol. As of Q2 2022, Binance Exchange is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, with a volume of $7.6 billion.

• Binance Coin is the cryptocurrency issued by the Binance exchange and trades with the BNB symbol.
• BNB was initially based on the Ethereum network but is now the native currency of Binance's own blockchain, the Binance chain.
• Every quarter, Binance uses one-fifth of its profits to repurchase and permanently destroy, or "burn," Binance coins held in its treasury.
• Binance was created as a utility token for discounted trading fees in 2017, but its uses have expanded to numerous applications, including payments for transaction fees (on the Binance Chain), travel bookings, entertainment, online services, and financial services.
• At the time of writing, Binance had a market cap of more than $56 billion and ranks behind only Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USD Tether in terms of market cap.

Binance coin initially ran on the Ethereum blockchain with ERC 20 standard but has since become the native coin of the Binance chain. It was launched during an initial coin offering (ICO) in July 2017 and has a strict maximum of 200 million BNB tokens. It offered 10%, or 20 million, BNB tokens to angel investors, 40%, or 80 million, tokens to the founding team, and the remaining 50%, or 100 million, to the various participants through the ICO process.

Almost half the funds raised during the ICO process were intended to be used for Binance branding and marketing, while around one-third were used to build the Binance platform and perform necessary upgrades to the Binance ecosystem.

BNB was initially based on the Ethereum network but is now the native currency of Binance's own blockchain, the Binance chain.

USDC, or USD Coin, is a popular stablecoin in the world of cryptocurrencies. It is a digital asset that is designed to maintain a stable value by being pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio.

• Stable Value: USDC is a stablecoin, which means its value is typically maintained at or very close to $1 USD. This stability makes it a useful tool for traders and investors who want to avoid the volatility often associated with other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
• Regulatory Compliance: USDC is known for its regulatory compliance. It is issued by regulated financial institutions, and the company behind it, Circle, is known for its commitment to adhering to financial regulations. This provides users with a sense of trust and transparency.
• Transparency: USDC operates on a blockchain, which means that transactions can be publicly audited. Circle regularly releases attestations, which are third-party audits that confirm that the amount of USDC in circulation matches the amount of USD held in reserve.
• Use Cases: USDC can be used for a wide range of purposes within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. It's often used for trading, as a stable store of value, and for transferring funds quickly and cheaply across borders. It's also used in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and lending platforms.
• Accessibility: USDC is widely available on many cryptocurrency exchanges, making it easy for users to buy, sell, and trade. It can also be stored in various cryptocurrency wallets that support Ethereum-based tokens (USDC is commonly issued on the Ethereum blockchain).
• Interoperability: USDC is available on multiple blockchain networks. While it was initially launched on the Ethereum blockchain, it has expanded to other networks like Algorand, Solana, and more. This makes it more versatile and accessible for users on different platforms.

USDC is a stablecoin that offers stability and transparency, making it a popular choice for those who want to transact and store value in the cryptocurrency space while minimizing exposure to the price volatility seen in other digital assets. Its regulatory compliance and widespread availability have contributed to its widespread adoption in the crypto industry.