Comparison of cryptocurrencies

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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
IOST IOST 2019-02-25 High 21 billion N/A DPoS Voters receive 50% of the rewards earned by nodes with more than 2.1m votes iost.io
Cosmos ATOM 2019-03-14 High ~245,000,000 N/A DPoS Multi-blockchain network cosmos.network
Waves WAVES 2016-04-15 High 100,000,000 N/A DPoS Oriented on hosting smart contracts wavesplatform.com
Decred DCR 2016-02-08 High 21,000,000 BLAKE-256 PoW/DPoS Splits rewards between PoW miners and DPoS voters decred.org
Tezos XTZ 2018-08-30 High ~810,000,000 N/A DPoS First platform to implement fork-less decentralized governance tezos.com
IOTEX IOTX 2019-04-15 High 10 billion N/A DPoS Oriented at IoT devices connectivity and data processing www.iotex.io
IRISnet IRIS 2019-06-21 High ~2 billion N/A DPoS Integrated into Cosmos network irisnet.org
QTUM QTUM 2017-10-04 High ~101,000,000 N/A DPoS Supports a full x86 virtual machine on blockchain qtum.org
Algorand ALGO TBA High 10 billion N/A PoS Implements Pure PoS consensus algorithm algorand.com
Harmony ONE 2019-06-28 High 12,6 billion N/A DPoS Multi-blockchain network able to support digital lives of 10B people harmony.one
EtherZero ETZ 2019-01-19 High 194,000,000 N/A MPoS Masternode PoS with self-staking etherzero.org
ICON ICX 2018-01-24 High ~500,000,000 N/A DPoS icon.foundation