At the launch of our crypto cashback shopping beta, we support 11 coins and tokens as payout currencies.

Here are the 11 assets that made our launch list —and why.

Bitcoin

The big daddy. There would be no crypto market and the accompanying global movement towards decentralization without the first: BTC.

Brought into being by the sweat of the brow of an anonymous programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin solved the double spending problem that previously made the concept of digital cash impotent, through its proof of work, peer to peer protocol design.

Today BTC is in use for multiple significant purposes. These include functioning as a store of value as the new ‘digital gold’, a hedge against government backed fiat currencies, and as a major unit of account for thousands of crypto trading markets.

Bitcoin also stands as a contender to become the currency and payment system of the Internet, as progress continues towards the Lightning off-chain scaling implementation.

Owing to its decentralized nature and transparent monetary policy, some even postulate a future where Bitcoin replaces the U.S. dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.

The most popular, most liquid, and oldest cryptocurrency in the world, Bitcoin is a crypto essential.

Ethereum

The mother ether. The Ethereum smart contract platform gave birth to a Cambrian explosion in crypto-assets, with the majority of the $20 billion in worldwide initial coin offering sales since 2017 taking place on the Ethereum blockchain.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine extends the capabilities of the blockchain structure devised by Nakamoto and allows for new applications beyond currencies.

By allowing for arbitrary computation through its ‘Turing completeness’, the Ethereum blockchain opens up entire industries and conventional business models to be disrupted by decentralist philosophies through decentralized applications ( ‘dApps’ ) powered by smart contracts.

Ether (ETH) is the gas or fee that must be paid to the distributed nodes that sustain and perform the computations for the Ethereum network.

While much of the demand for ETH has come from buyers seeking to participate in initial coin offerings, Ethereum supporters anticipate additional future demand for ETH to come from dApps that successfully gain market share among existing industries, or create new markets; with ETH required for dApp usage.

Still, the future for Ethereum as the decentralized computing platform of choice comes down to its ability to scale its transaction capacity, with proposed solutions such as PLASMA in the works.

If the Ethereum Foundation and collaborating developers can deliver on scaling and show the world that its Casper proof of stake protocol is a superior consensus algorithm to the energy intensive proof of work introduced by Nakamoto, then ETH can even give BTC a run for its money.

Ether today is the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

EOS

The “ETH Killer.” Launched as an initial coin offering on the same platform that it promises to defeat, the originators behind EOS, block.one, raised a staggering $4 billion in ETH to fund the development of a new smart contract and distributed computing blockchain that many EOS supporters call the “Ethereum killer.”

While Ethereum has a move to a proof of stake consensus algorithm embedded in its future roadmap, EOS is already live with their own flavor called dPOS, or delegated proof of stake.

In dPOS, holders vote with their EOS tokens to choose block producers (‘BPs’), which are the nodes with the authority to provide the computing resources and transaction verification for the EOS network.

And since voting for BPs is a continuous process, nodes are incentivized to keep a constant reputation of fairness and correctness or risk being voted out of block producer status.

Block producers are paid for their services in newly issued EOS, with all network transactions being free. EOS is required to purchase RAM, which is a necessary and discrete resource required to run dApps on the EOS network.

Though the EOS platform lets developers write in familiar and known programming languages such as C++, Ethereum does have a head start in developing its developer ecosystem (pun intended) despite introducing a totally new programming language called Solidity.

However, should block.one carefully deploy the capital raised in the EOS ICO into new developments on EOS, things may prove bloody for its competitors.

Of note, early ETH bull Mike Novogratz recently signaled his interest with a significant investment within the EOS ecosystem.

Nano

The promising underdog. Originally known as Raiblocks, Nano is a cryptocurrency thats its creators say they want to “do one thing and do it well”: digital cash that is free to transfer, settles instantly, and at blistering throughput; all the while having a decentralized network that is maximally eco-friendly.

Nano achieves this through a ‘block lattice’ structure, where instead of all transactions being validated by all nodes, each ‘account’ computes its own proof of work and thus is its own blockchain. Global verification between the participants in this lattice structure is arrived at consensus through dPOS.

Originally issued through a captcha faucet, Nano’s initial distribution enabled people in inflation prone countries without the ability or resources to mine crypto to get a piece of the initial supply.

This act has parlayed into one of the most vibrant, vocal and loyal communities within crypto, a community which is now behind their “MtGox moment” with the Bitgrail incompetence fiasco.

With Nano being one of the coins to lead recent rallies in the current bear market, the market has signaled that Nano has the properties and features important to the digital cash concept.

Bitcoin Cash

Will the “real Bitcoin” please stand up? The first major contentious fork in Bitcoin, BTC holders up to a certain block number also own Bitcoin Cash (BCH) from the resulting chain split.

BCH arose from an ideological divide on how to handle scaling Bitcoin, with one camp arguing for an increase in block size, and the other camp arguing that such a measure will lead to network centralization due to the hardware requirements needed for onchain scaling.

Early Bitcoin investor and evangelist Roger Ver spearheads Bitcoin Cash alongside Jihan Wu of Bitmain (the dominant ASIC maker) as the one “true Bitcoin”, pointing to Satoshi’s whitepaper as axiom, with their narrative positioning big block BCH as “digital cash” alongside the small block BTC narrative as “digital gold.”

BCH’s utility was apparent when the BTC blockchain faced congestion issues, as long confirmation times and high fees set in during the tail end of the 2017 crypto bubble. Its future is heavily dependent on whether or not the Bitcoin Lightning Network implementation will succeed, thus making BCH potentially redundant.

To us, BCH is an example of the freedom of choice available in crypto markets, with forks in the road allowing participants to choose which asset, network and ideology aligns with their views and values.

Today, Bitcoin Cash is the most liquid, and has the most exchange and ecosystem support of any of the Bitcoin forks, of which there are many.

Litecoin

“Silver to Bitcoin’s gold.” Created by early Coinbase employee Charlie Lee to “be the silver to Bitcoin’s gold.” Litecoin’s consensus algorithm scrypt resists ASIC centralization and allows the average joe with graphic cards to mine transactions for the network.

One of the oldest cryptocurrencies, Litecoin also featured a 2.5 min blocktime, offering faster confirmation times in comparison to the roughly 10 minutes it takes for a transaction to confirm once on Bitcoin.

We’ve included Litecoin as a payout currency due the age of its community and historical significance to crypto. LTC also has deep liquidity with wide exchange support globally and significant daily trading volumes.

Much of the future of Litecoin rests in the hands of the adoption efforts driven by the Litecoin Foundation and supporting ecosystem players like TokenPay.

XRP

“The Banker’s Coin.” Ripple’s XRP is positioned as the digital asset of choice for cross border settlements between financial institutions, by its U.S. maker Ripple, Inc.

Ripple piloted their xCurrent product to more than 120 banks and financial institutions, but received criticism from XRP holders for this, as xCurrent does not involve and add liquidity to XRP.

Just recently, the company announced that XRP is to come into use through the new xRapid product, which Ripple says “enhances the speed off cross-border currency transfers.” The company anticipates xRapid to be used by banks and remittance groups to speed up and save costs on cross border transfers.

As explained by Ripple:

“A payment journey with xRapid looks like this: a financial institution connects directly to digital asset exchanges in both the originating and destination corridors. The originating currency is exchanged into XRP which provides the necessary liquidity to power the final payment, and then in seconds that XRP is exchanged into the destination currency in the second digital asset exchange. Once this transaction takes place, the funds are sent out on the local rails of the destination country for payout. The transaction is tracked end-to-end, and the result is a cross-border payment that is cheaper and faster than ever before.

We are supporting Ripple due the liquidity afforded by its position as #3 largest digital asset by market capitalization, and for its rapid settlement times and negligible transfer fees.

Monero

Mandatory privacy. The first major cryptocurrency focused on anonymity, with privacy enforced at the protocol level.

Ring signatures are used to mask the address of the sender. They work by having multiple parties pooled from the network sign a transaction, making it difficult to determine who the original sender was.

Stealth addresses masks the receiver’s address. The sender creates a random one-time address that is based on the receivers published address making it so that only the receiver and sender are able to determine where the Monero was sent.

Using XMR provides privacy that is currently unavailable in the more popular blockchains, where transaction data is visible to all.

Monero uses the CryptoNight hashing algorithm, which allows CPU miners to participate in the network. The development team actively upgrades the network to prevent ASIC hash domination.

XMR is a top 10 coin by market capitalization, showing the market’s value on and need for privacy in digital transactions.

Zcash

Optional privacy. ZCash is known for implementing zero knowledge proofs via ‘ZKSNarks‘ for anonymity. Zero knowledge proofs are a break through cryptographic technique that allows for verification to be performed without sensitive information being revealed, hence ‘zero knowledge’.

In contrast to Monero’s forced privacy, ZCash is optionally private. Transactions initiated with transparent addresses (starting with t) are public while transactions through shielded addresses (starting with z) are private.

A consistent top 25 crypto by market cap, ZCash is the first privacy coin to be supported by a major U.S. fiat to crypto exchange, with Gemini opening ZEC/USD, ZEC/BTC and ZEC/ETH markets.

Development is funded by 10% of coin issuance of all ZCash allocated to developer team.

IOTA

Enabling machine capitalism. Feeless, IOTA is a ‘quantum resistant’ (due to use of hash based Winternitz one time signatures for address generation instead of the quantum vulnerable ECDSA used in Bitcoin) cryptocurrency designed for a future machine to machine market arising from IOT devices, while also being effective for use by people.

IOTA is designed to scale as more entities use it, since to perform one transaction on IOTA requires one to confirm 2 others first. This clever crypto-economics is also a byproduct of the network’s solution to spam attacks, since the coin costs nothing to transfer.

The IOTA Foundation announced extending the capabilities of IOTA to allow smart contracts, with the future Qubic release.

The Foundation and third party IOTA ecosystem developers are making great strides in business development, IOTA being in use as a payment instrument for electric vehicle charging stations in Europe and in Volkswagon’s ride sharing app.

Recently, BiiLabs announced that they are in talks with the Taiwanese government for the use of IOTA as the ID system for its citizens.

Binance Coin

Always in demand. Issued on Ethereum by exchange startup Binance in July 2017, the $15M Binance Coin ICO led to one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, with the Binance Exchange growing to $1 billion in profits less than 12 months since inception.

Spending Binance Coin on the exchange cuts trading fees in half, and is a leading example of how a corporate issued token can be integrated into and channel the health of an underlying business.

The buy back and burn model characteristic of the coin further integrates it into Binance Exchange’s cashflows, with 20% of quarterly profits made by Binance spent on removing BNB from the token supply.

Binance is a forward thinking organization, and has announced plans to decentralize its exchange business. It funds and incubates new startups through its Binance Labs and Binance Launchpad, opens fiat to crypto onramps in new markets (recently, Uganda and Singapore), and is constantly working with international regulators at crafting tempered crypto regulation.

Even Binance employees show skin in the game, their salaries being paid in BNB.

We’ve added BNB as a payout option in Coinbates due to the coin providing an immediate benefit (reduced exchange fees) on Binance, one of the most secure and high volume exchanges with diverse markets and pairings.