The cryptocurrency market is explosive which currently serves hundreds of currencies. Almost all of them are obvious scams—including many which purport to have a large market cap. This article aims to list only the most relevant cryptocurrencies in terms of novel technological advancements or strong engineering teams, or due to widespread awareness thereof. Direct, low-level scams should not be listed here.

Cryptocurrency Exchange symbol Launched Anonymity Max supply Algorithm Proof Type Notes Website

Bitcoin BTC 2009-01-03 Low ~21,000,000 SHA256 PoW First blockchain. bitcoin.org

Tonal Bitcoin TBC 2011-01-02 Low ~21,000,000 SHA256 PoW First on-chain alternative. -

BCash BCH 2017-08-01 Low ~21,000,000 SHA256 PoW BCash is an altcoin based on an old snapshot of Bitcoin's blockchain (2017 Aug 1) with replay protection and an increased block size limit of 8MB. An unusual emergency difficulty adjustment algorithm causes significant periods of hyperinflation. Significant miner centralization; often a very low hashrate. Major proponents deliberately attempt to confuse new users into thinking BCash is actually Bitcoin, especially by using the name "Bitcoin Cash". On 15 November 2018, an airdrop of BCash occurred between two rival factions now called BCash (BCH) and CraigCoin (BSV). bitcoincash.org

CraigCoin BSV 2018-11-15 Low ~21,000,000 SHA256 PoW On 15 November 2018, a hard fork chain split of BCash occurred between two rival factions called BCH and BSV. Mostly based around a cult following of the fraudster Craig Wright who claims to be Satoshi (hence SV = Satoshi's Vision). https://bitcoinsv.io/

Namecoin NMC 2011-04-18 Low ~21,000,000 SHA256 Merged PoW First cryptocurrency that implemented Satoshi's BitDNS idea. Essentially the first real altcoin. Still under active development. First merged-mined altcoin. namecoin.info

Dash DASH 2014-01-18 Low 22,000,000 X11 PoW/PoS Introduced the X11 algorithm, which is just a composite function of multiple hashing algorithms. Had a significant failure mode in the beginning which equated to a majority premine by a small number of Amazon EC2 customers. This means their Master Node algorithm has been in a failure mode from the beginning. dash.org

Ethereum Classic ETC 2015-08-07 Low Infinite Ethash PoW Majority premine sale. Used to be known as just "Ethereum" and "ETH" until the Ethereum Foundation split off an altcoin using their trademark. ethereumclassic.org

Ethereum ETH 2016-07-20 Low Infinite Ethash PoW An altcoin of Ethereum Classic which split from ETC's blockchain in order to refund the Ethereum Foundation's members' money when the DAO was exploited. Regular hardforks to bail out larger losses by e.g. ETH foundation. Source of the ICO bubbles. Multiple client implementations which fail against each other in terms of consensus errors regularly. Requires multiple months of time to sync to eth blockchain. Contract-building tools interpret input incompatibly.

Litecoin LTC 2011-10-07 Low ~84,000,000 Scrypt PoW Originally meant to be a CPU-friendly "silver" to Bitcoin's "gold", the early SCRYPT parameters, it was discovered later, led directly to GPU, and then ASIC-mining almost from the start.

Monero XMR 2014-04-18 High Infinite (has tail emission of 0.6 XMR) RandomX (formerly CryptoNight) PoW The most successful implementation derived from the CryptoNote codedrop. Uses Ring CT and its own implementation of Confidential transactions, Stealth Addresses, Dandelion++ to enhance user privacy. getmonero.org

Zcash ZEC 2016-10-28 Medium ~21,000,000 Equihash PoW First cryptocurrency that implemented the zerocash protocol. Large "Founder's Reward" which is paid out over the first few years of mining to people including Roger Ver. z.cash