Comparison of cryptocurrencies

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.	Tonal Bitcoin
BCH	BCH	2017-08-01	Low	~21,000,000	SHA256	PoW	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 BCH is Bitcoin.
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.
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.	ethereum.org
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.	litecoin.org
Monero	XMR	2014-04-18	Medium	?	CryptoNight	PoW	The most successful implementation derived from the Cryptonote codedrop. Uses Ring Confidential Transactions.	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
Zcoin	XZC	2016-09-28	Medium	~21,000,000	Lyra2RE	PoW	First cryptocurrency that implemented the zerocoin protocol which also makes it the first useful Zero-knowledge proof based anonymous cryptocurrency. First that implements Merkle Tree Proof of Work (MTP).	zcoin.io