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History of Top Altcoins

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History of Top Altcoins

 

History of the Top Alt Coins

Following the success of bitcoin, there have been more than 1630 other cryptocurrencies created, they are collectively called “Alt Coins” since they serve as an alternate of bitcoin in the digital currency world.

Below, we have highlighted some of the popular alt coins with brief history of how they started. However, we know it is impossible to list these coins in the order of their popularity but we tried as much possible to limit the list to coins you may have heard or read about ― if haven’t traded before.

Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum was proposed in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer and launched in 2015. The platform became popular for its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) supported and smart contract platform. It enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications (DApps) which can run without any downtime. Ethereum (ETH) applications are run on its platform-specific cryptographic token known as ether. According to ETH, a centralized project can be decentralized using their platform ― it boasts of decentralizing anything. As of today, Ethereum is the second leading cryptocurrency following Bitcoin based on market cap.

Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin was one the early altcoins following bitcoin. It was launched in 2011, as a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license as it was created by Charlie Lee, an MIT graduate and former Google engineer. Unlike bitcoin, it has a faster block generation rate making its transaction confirmation faster. It is now widely accepted as a mode of payment by many merchants even in the black market ― it has gained trust over the years for being one of the oldest launched surviving cryptocurrencies.

Monero (XMR)

This is sometimes regarded as a cryptocurrency made specially for the darknet since its privacy policy favors the platform. Nevertheless, Monero, is still one of the most private oriented cryptocurrency today. Unlike other cryptocurrency, Monero uses an obfuscated public ledger which enables users to send transactions, but no outside observer can tell the source, amount or destination. It is well welcomed among cryptocurrency users that values privacy. Monero launch story was a fascinating one, as its first inventor know as thankful_for_today, a Bitcointalk forum user discovered the project was not well welcomed when he launched it in 2014 and later disappear from the platform. Some of the users of the forum decided to continue the project and here we are today.

Zcash (ZEC)

Zcash was launched on 28 October 2016 as decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency. Zcash offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. According to Zcash, its users are more secured than any other cryptocurrency platform. The platform allows users the option to select not been anonymous. This they say is for auditing purposes allowing users the choice to comply with anti-money laundering or tax regulations.

Dash (DASH)

Formerly known as darkcoin, Dash is like bitcoin since it was forked from its code only that it maintains more anonymity as it works on a decentralized mastercode network that makes transactions almost untraceable. It was created by Evan Duffield and launched in January 2014 as “Xcoin” before changing name to “dark coin” and later to “Dash” in 2015. The platform experienced an increasing fan following in a within a short time after its launch. The 45% of mined dash coins go to miners, 45% to masternodes, and 10% into a fund that the DAO invests.

Vertcoin (VTC)

Just like Litecoin, Vertcoin is an open-source cryptocurrency and clone of bitcoin which was released on GitHub on January 8, 2014. It is reputed for introducing “"Adaptive N‐Factor" to the Scrypt algorithm which determined how much memory was required to compute the hashing functions and increased with time.  The platform has hard forked twice in order to reject ASICs (a specially designed hardware), as well as CPU botnets from contributing to its peer-to-peer network and allowing consumer grade hardware (like GPUs) to secure the network.

Ripple (XRP)

Ripple was created by Ripple Labs Inc., a US-based technology company and was launched in 2012. The main idea behind its creation is achieve a secure, fast and low-fee or no-cost global transactions. It has been helping banks to make international payments at low-cost since it launched. Its mode of operation is distinct from all other cryptocurrencies as its consensus ledger does not requires mining. It is most popular among financial institutions.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash is another alt coin on our list with a remarkable story just as Monero. In 2017, a group of developers who were not satisfied with the block size limit of the bitcoin decided to amend the code to increase it from 1MB to 8MB. This resulted in a disagreement with other developers who are satisfied with the limited size. And ensued in the split of the bitcoin ledger after the change (referred to as hard fork) became effective. In May 2018, Bitcoin cash daily recorded transaction is approximately one-tenth of that of bitcoin.

EOS (EOS)

Although a newbie, this cryptocurrency never failed to grab public attention since it was launched. EOS was created by Dan Larimer and launched in June, 2017. Larimer was also the founder of the popular blockchain-based social media platform Steemit which rewards contributors with using cryptocurrency. The platform is run using EOS.IO which functions just like a computer operating system and it does not require mining before coins can be produced.

Cardano (ADA)

Another newbie on our list. Cardano was invented by Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum and launched in September of 2017. Just like where its inventor is coming from, Cardona has many features just like Ethereum and pose to be on a mission to solve most challenges facing most cryptocurrency such as scalability. Daedalus is the official cryptocurrency wallet that holds ADA ― it allows transfer to other addresses and recently there are more third-party supporting ADA.

Conclusion

Everyday, new cryptocurrency are being launched to compensate for the weakness of the bitcoin. The ever competition and innovation of blockchain programmers has so far been nothing but healthy as we now have cryptocurrencies focusing on seamless international transaction (Ripples); another for ICOs and smart contracts (Ethereum); and others making transactions easier than possible.

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