The Biggest 5 Cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin

Bitcoin blew up like very few things have in 2017 - and a lot of investors and traders are still kicking themselves for not having gotten jumped onto the bitcoin train sooner. While bitcoin has become the leader in the crypto space, it’s far from the only cryptocurrency in the space. Currencies that came after bitcoin are called “altcoin” and there are quite a few now with significant weight behind it. Let’s get into crypto trading 101 post-bitcoin - who are the major players to look out for?

Litecoin.

Litecoin has been around for a while - since 2011 in fact. It was among the first bitcoin followers. Litecoin is commonly referred to as the younger brother to bitcoin, the silver to bitcoin’s gold per se. It was conceptualized and developed by a former Google engineer and MIT graduate, Charlie Lee. There are many parallels between bitcoin and Litecoin, but what makes Lite different is its faster block generation rate which leads to faster transaction speeds as well as a few other technical aspects. It’s also becoming one of the more accepted bitcoins that are trying to break into the market of being an independent mode of payment .

Ethereum.

Ethereum, or Ether for short, works around a different model, this one being based on Smart Contracts and Distributed Applications to be executed upon certain conditions being met without any downtime, fraud or other factors that require human judgement. The way Ether took off was in an Initial Coin Offer in the form of a pre-sale which received an overwhelmingly positive response. It is a strong cryptocurrency very attractive to people in IT due to its internal platform and is now the second most valued altcoin with a market capitalization of over 41 billion US Dollars.

Zcash.

Zcash has an interesting premise - it’s newer on the block, being established in 2016. It defines itself as “if bitcoin is like http for money, Zcash is https,” which is a big deal if you understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Now would be a good time to don the trading 101 hat because these are the things that can determine the growth of a cryptocurrency. Zcash offers a higher level of privacy compared to bitcoin - while all data and transactions are stored in the chain as blocks, key details such as sender and receiver are kept anonymous.

Dash.

Dash’s first name wasn’t Dash, but Darkcoin instead. It worked primarily with one of the core concepts of crypto that bitcoin lost as its popularity skyrocketed, which is anonymity and privacy - similar to what Zcash is doing. However, the currency has changed its ambitions since then, and now aims to be a completely different thing, which is to be a replacement for cash, and it’s working. It can be mined using both CPU and GPU and has a decent amount of fans and followers as a result thereof.

Ripple

Ripple is another big name in the crypto scene and has been making waves. Ripple is focused more on banks, aiming to provide cross-border payments in real time with end-to-end transparency at far lower costs than what banks are currently investing to be able to do the same thing. Ripple is a bit different to the other currencies - it doesn’t require mining, which has the added benefit of not requiring strong computing power or network availability. Ripple is going all-in on the B2B type of blockchain which is most likely going to be the type to shape and change many global economies in the next 5 to 10 years.