While those who are not enlightened may believe that cryptocurrencies are headed for a major failure, the reality is that the cryptography market is full of activity. Although trading volumes and encryption prices have declined significantly in the last year, the world's major encryption projects are working hard to make payments and peer-to-peer transactions easier and more adaptable.
Here are the top 10 cryptocurrencies of 2019 and what they do.
No. 1 – Bitcoin (BTC)
The first and largest cryptocurrency in the world, Bitcoin is the epitome of the world of digital money and the concepts it supports. Bitcoin started 10 years ago when a developer / group of developers using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a whitepaper called "Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic payment system". He developed a distributed book-led technology called blockchain that could be used to make pseudonymous payments to anyone in the world without interacting with central banks or other financial entities.
Since then Bitcoin has been bifurcated several times, including popular coins like Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, but the original BTC's enigma remains. The new BTCs are produced in the network through a process called mining that also checks the transactions on the network. Each block requires 10 minutes to produce. Bitcoin has faced some downsizing problems, but the lightning network solves many of these problems with ease.
# 2 – XRP (XRP)
XRP is the native currency of the Ripple blockchain network, run by a San Francisco-based startup. The company, Ripple, provides several blockchain-based products that could be used by banks and other financial institutions to make their existing systems faster and cheaper. In one of the solutions, called xRapid, XRP is used as a bridge resource while making cross-border rapid payments between different payment corridors.
Over the years, Ripple has numerous high-profile collaborations with banks and financial institutions around the world and has a strong presence in remittance markets in Asia and the Middle East. It has also been ruined in controversy as the company holds about 60% of the existing total XRP. The start is still valued at over $ 20 billion.
# 3 – Ethereum (ETH)
The second generation of blockchain began with Ethereum following the same Proof of Work (PoW) model of Bitcoin. However, what works for Ethereum is that it comes with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that allows you to create decentralized applications and smart contracts on the network. This creates endless use cases for blockchain in addition to payment processing. Users can create smart contracts to make payments, agreements and more.
Vitalik Buterin is the co-founder of Ethereum, but the management of the blockchain is entrusted to the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization in Switzerland. Ethereum is complete Turing and the platform's cryptocurrency is called Ether. It also allows users to launch their own cryptographic projects based on the platform, called ERC20 tokens. Most of the ICOs in the world are conducted using these tokens. Ethereum will soon launch the highly anticipated update of Constantinople.
# 4 – Bitcoin Cash (BCHABC)
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) began as a fork of the Bitcoin Core blockchain (BTC), claiming to follow the peer-to-peer electronic payment system that Nakamoto envisioned. Bitcoin Cash separated from Bitcoin in block 478558. It was thought to be a fast, reliable and stable payment system that would allow traders and users to quickly and easily interact on the blockchain.
The Bitcoin Cash we know today is a fork of fork. Due to some controversy in the BCH community regarding the height of the blocks, the forked chain went through another segregation, giving rise to BCHABC and BCHSV at the end of 2018. Bitcoin Cash ABC arises from an idea by Roger Ver and Jihan Wu, who is working with several other developers to create a seamless network of payments characterized by reduced rates and wider adoption.
# 5 – EOS (EOS)
The EOS blockchain is intended to be a blockchain-based operating system that will be used to support decentralized industrial scale applications. EOS has captured the world's attention with its annual ICO which has raised over $ 4.1 billion for the project. It started as an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.
EOS has several important concepts and characteristics that should be highlighted. First of all, the network wants to completely eliminate network tariffs. Secondly, it can handle millions of users at the same time. Another important feature of the blockchain is that it uses a delegated DPOS (Proof of Stake) system to verify transactions, taking it a step ahead of traditional PoW and PoS systems.
Block.One, based in the Cayman Islands, is the publisher of the EOS blockchain. Its CEO is Brendon Blumer and CTO is Dan Larimer, the creator of DPOS and DAO.
# 6 – Stellar (XLM)
Stellar is an open source project that provides a reliable and stable payment network that could be used for cross-border transactions and for cryptocurrency in legal currency transfers. The protocol is supported by the Stellar Development Foundation. The native cryptocurrency of the blockchain is Lumens (sometimes referred to as Lumen stars).
Stellar also has some "star" partnerships in the industry. It is integrated with an open source messaging platform called Vumi which uses the mobile phone conversation time as a currency. He also collaborated with Oradian for microfinance institutions in Nigeria. Deloitte also worked with Stellar to manage cross-border payments for the Deloitte digital bank. He also created a partnership with a large privately owned Indian bank – ICICI Bank and the IBM technology giant.
# 7 – Tether (USDT)
Tether is a stablecoin, which means that the value of this coin does not fluctuate. It is pegged to the US dollar 1: 1, which means that the value of a Tether currency will always be equal to the value of 1 USD. The currency is 100% USD-backed, which suggests that every USDT is offered when the developers have USD equivalent reserves.
Tether is also one of the most controversial currencies in the cryptocurrency sector. It has often been linked to the manipulation of Bitcoin prices through the cryptocurrency trade and has even been called a scam. Despite the accusations, Tether is the second coin with the highest volume in the crypto world, second only to Bitcoin.
# 8 – Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin is a Bitcoin fork designed to be an open source digital currency that is almost identical to Bitcoin. It depends on mathematics to provide people with more control over their finances. Litecoin was founded by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. Litecoin has made some improvements to Bitcoin, including larger transaction volumes thanks to a separate witness, reducing the time to only 25% of BTC. With faster processing times, the Litecoin network is more protected against double-expense attacks. It also has a larger coin limit (ie 84 million coins) and is relatively more difficult to extract.
Litecoin has been relatively quiet in the last year, but remains one of the major currencies with over $ 1 billion in market capitalization.
No. 9 – Tron (TRX)
Tron is published and managed by the Tron Foundation. It is a high-throughput chain that can easily handle over 2,000 transactions per second. With the goal of "decentralizing the web", Tron has always managed to stay in the news. Justin Sun, the project's founder, noted that TRX will eventually become a private currency. Currently, TRX finds utility in the numerous dApps supported on the platform. Tron hosts numerous gaming apps and is now also home to BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer sharing service. He insists a lot on the best methods of creating and distributing content.
TRX started with the Ethereum blockchain as ERC20 token, but soon switched to its main network. Basically, it is very similar to Ethereum. It has a Tron virtual machine (TVM), which allows the creation of dApps. It is expected that Tron will soon bring Project Atlas to the forefront and launch its own TRC10 / 20 tokens to support other cryptographic projects as well.
# 10 – Bitcoin SV (BSV)
Bitcoin Satoshi Vision is a newly created coin that was born after Bitcoin Cash's blockchain split into two competing chains. Bitcoin Satoshi Vision or Bitcoin SV claims to be supporters of Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision for Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network. It aims to create a more scalable, secure and stable blockchain that allows traders and users around the world to use smart contracts, tokenization and atomic exchange capabilities.
Bitcoin SV was also a controversial currency, especially because one of its supporters Craig Wright claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto but his claims were never supported by sufficient evidence and were dispelled by several members of the cryptic community over the years. Wright was previously involved in the creation of a new Bitcoin client called Bitcoin Classic. The future of BSV will be decided in 2019 when it forges partnerships and demonstrates cases of use of the real world with an increase in block heights.
Summary of the first 10 cryptocurrencies
The world's top 10 cryptocurrencies are currently some of the fastest growing projects in the world. Bitcoin, XRP and Ethereum have market capitalizations ranging from several billion dollars and dominate the encrypted markets. There are emerging blockchain projects like Cardano, IOTA, Monero, Dash and also Dogecoin which are proving to be very popular among developers and users. The first 5 cryptocurrencies for market capitalization can be found Here.