What made the top 10 altcoins so popular?

Ethereum

Ethereum was created in 2015 and has been very popular due to its role in smart contracts. The use case of Ethereum is incredible and a lot of new coins aim (and fail) to be the ETH killer. Investors also saw the benefits of Ethereum due to how quick the transaction time was in comparison to Bitcoin (6 minutes for Ethereum in comparison to roughly 78 minutes for Bitcoin.)

There was big hype in 2017 for Ethereum and questions were asked on whether it was going to overtake Bitcoin, eventually people gathered that the Flippening turned into the Floppening.

Ripple

Ripple has always been popular due to their involvement with banks. Investors realise that banks would help speed up the process of mass adoption and mass adoption means more demand, meaning their investment would rise. There have always been big debates when it comes to Ripple as it isn’t aiming for the decentralisation that blockchain was designed for. I believe that new investors have seen how cheap it is and hoped that it can reach the price level that Bitcoin is at; this is very common with cheap coins that have a lot of hype surrounding them e.g TRX, XVG.

The average transaction time for Ripple is 4 seconds and it can handle 1500 transactions per second which is highly impressive.

Bitcoin Cash

Where to start with this one? Bitcoin Cash was created in August 2017 in result of a Bitcoin fork, it was then given in a ratio of 1:1 for people holding bitcoin. Since the creation, Bitcoin Cash has been very controversial as one of their promoters (Roger Ver) has continuously attempted to trick new investors into thinking his coin is the real Bitcoin. Some investors do think that Ver is trying to help the community see the flaw’s in Bitcoin, but others aren’t a fan of him and the team providing a centralised role in the coin. Bitcoin Cash is quicker and cheaper in terms of transactions so it is interesting to think that maybe it would be performing better if it wasn’t for Ver playing self-destruct! Average speed for a transaction is 60 minutes.

EOS

If I had $1 for every time I heard EOS was going to kill ETH then I would be able to fund my own ETH killing project… Anyway, EOS is similar to ETH but has very advanced technology as their smart contracts have no transaction fee’s as well as transaction time taking 1.5 seconds. In addition to this, the EOS network handles up to 50,000 transactions per second as well as having a highly secure network. Considering it has only been around since this January it is very impressive how well they’ve done. One to keep an eye on for sure!

Stellar/XLM

Think of XLM and Ripple like siblings, XLM has the brains as well as the beauty and Ripple has, well, not much. The transaction speed is 5 seconds with an incredibly low transaction cost. Stellar has the same approach in regard to working with banks but the crypto community have no controversy with them due to their decentralised nature. It is not uncommon for investors to be involved with XLM and XRP as a way of hedging against the other. Personally, I don’t own any XLM but if I had to buy one coin to hold for the next 3 years then it would happily be this one.

Litecoin

Litecoin was created in 2011 and has been referred to as “the silver to Bitcoin’s Gold.” In my personal opinion, Coinbase has played a huge role in keeping Litecoin popular due to their only being 3 coins for a very long time. I feel that a lot of investors would have saw how cheap Litecoin was on Coinbase and thought that it could have the bull run that Bitcoin and Ethereum have successfully had. There are no doubts that Litecoin is a good coin, but are there better? Definitely.

The transaction speed on average is 30 minutes with the cost being low and the verification being instant.

Cardano

Cardano is also a smart contract platform which doesn’t aim to overthrow banks but to work with them. They have a reasonable aim which is to use blockchain to help banking systems operate in areas where they are usually unable to. Because of this, Cardano keep regulators in mind so that they won’t be affected for when regulations eventually come to crypto. I believe that Cardano remained popular due to their very simplistic but very achievable goal, whilst also working with banks which seems to be popular amongst the top 10.

A transaction on Cardano takes an average of 5 minutes and every transaction comes with a proof of legitimacy.

Monero

Interesting coin to say the least, Monero is key for those who are wanting the upmost privacy for their transactions and has been very controversial because of it. It is impossible to work out the receiving address unless you are involved in the transaction yourself. This is a complete opposite to how you can track large bitcoin accounts and see when they have sent out transactions and how much they have decided to move. Monero is popular due to its uniqueness and the benefits it can bring to big money wanting to move funds discreetly. The transaction speed for Monero is an average of 30 minutes whilst it can handle 1000 transactions per second.

The general tech of Monero is incredible and I don’t think it’s worth dampening the image based on a few illegal events; the US dollar is used in many similar events and no one has any concerns regarding that!

Dash

Dash is a great coin that works on speed and privacy as well as having their own pre-paid debit card that can be used in shops. They also have developed a technology called InstantX where transactions will be complete within 4 seconds when used (average transaction without this setting is 15 minutes.) Dash can process up to 56 transactions per second whereas Bitcoin can process 3 transactions per second. Dash has remained popular as it has been created with Bitcoin’s core code and in a way is an upgraded version of Bitcoin.

IOTA

The technology of IOTA is incredible, and I’m actually surprised it’s only 12th based on Market Cap. IOTA have developed a system that enables free transactions as well as the availability to process transactions offline. There are no miners required for IOTA as they have created a system in which you have to verify the past two transactions (minimum) in order for your transaction to send (average time of transaction is 3 minutes). I believe it is popular due to how good the technology is behind it and the fact that there’s no scalability concerns.

Makes you wonder how different the Market would be if it was solely based on technology!

What better way to end an article than with some thrilling disclaimers

You will find a lot of my personal opinions on altcoins in here and none of it is financial advice. I only own Cardano out of the altcoins mentioned and have no intentions of buying any others anytime soon. Data gathered was from https://www.abitgreedy.com/transaction-speed/

Twitter- @RonaldMcDonalt

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