I think it’s doing a disservice to the industry as a whole. The term ‘altcoin’ implies that everything exists as an alternative to Bitcoin which is crazy when half of the “competing” projects aren’t even currencies. Furthermore, it makes the assumption that the primary initiative for the coin is as a currency. This is not the way we should be defining the market.

I think it would improve the public’s perception and give more validity to the projects coming out of crypto if we dropped the term ‘altcoin’ in favour of something new.

An initial idea for a name is “ChainApp”.

ChainApp — any application that utilizes the blockchain

This term can be used in place of the term ‘altcoin’ and is more representative of what these projects really are.

Whether or not we decide to call them ChainApp’s, I do think we need to have this discussion. It’s a legacy term that’s holding the perception of industry back and is one of the remaining barriers in the way of mainstream adoption.