Cryptocurrency has been widely adopted in the past two years and a lot of people are still finding the courage to dip their toes into the market. From the start of 2019 all the way up to today in 2022 there has been an extreme amount of capital invested into these digital assets. In this article we will focus on the top 10 cryptocurrencies ranked by market cap and give a brief description of each coin. Currently there are more than 9,000 different cryptocurrencies with roughly 70 coins surpassing $1 billion in market cap. If one of these peaks your interest it is recommended to do extensive research before investing.
Bitcoin:
Market cap of $592 Billion
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency that was release as open-source in 2009. In 2009 the coin started off at less than $0.01 to reaching heights of almost $70,000 and today has settled around $31,000. With a maximum limited supply of only 21 Million coins and those coins becoming harder and harder to mine each day adds scarcity to the coin, as for each millionaire in the world there is technically less than 1 BTC. BTC currently outranks some of the most popular companies by market cap today such as: Facebook, NVIDIA, J&J, Visa, JPMorgan Chase, S&P 500 ETF and much more.
Ethereum:
Market cap of $219 Billion
Ethereum was release in 2015 as a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Since then we have seen ETH go from less than $1 almost all the way up to $5,000. The amount of coins is not hard capped like BTC and there are currently 119 million coins in existence. 72 million coins came from the genesis crowd sale, 45 million from miners verifying the network transactions and blocks and 600,000 from Eth2 staking rewards with a total of 2.4 million ETH already burned since the introduction of EIP 1559. With ETH moving from POW to POS in the near future and some many projects being hosted on the block chain there is a bright future. Currently there are over 3,000 dApps running on Ethereum and over 5 million coins locked into ETH 2.0. With this much capital locked away and invested into the network we should see more price stability in the near future.
BNB:
Market cap of $47 Billion
BNB was founded in 2017 by a developer who had previously worked on high frequency trading software. BNB is a cryptocurrency that is issued by the Binance exchange, a platform for trading all kinds of cryptocurrencies. BNB initially was based off of the Ethereum blockchain but has since created its own blockchain. The devs have also decided that every quarter Binance will use one-fifth of its profits to repurchase and burn these coins to increase scarcity. We have seen this coin go from $0.10 to a staggering $650 per coin. With the coins functionality, market cap and the devs re-investing into the project it makes sense this is the 3rd highest coin based on market cap.
Cardano
Market cap of $20 Billion
Cardano (ADA) like many others on this list is a decentralized open-source project that was founded in 2015. Cardano aims to decentralize application development (dApp) using a multi-asset ledger and verifiable smart contracts. The founder of Cardano is the co-founder of Ethereum and went off to make this project and is building it in five stages. These five stages are foundation, decentralization, smart contracts, scaling and last but not least governance.
Ripple
Market cap of $19 Billion
Ripple (XRP) was founded in 2012 and is a remittance network and real-time gross settlement system built upon, you guessed it, and open source platform. Ripple is a blockchain-based payment network and protocol mainly supporting its own coin XRP. Instead of using POW, Ripple uses a consensus mechanism. This a group of bank-owned servers to confirm the transactions users make. These transactions take less energy then most cryptocurrencies, are confirmed quickly, and typically have low transaction fees.
Solana
Market cap of $13 Billion
Solana (SOL) is a blockchain with smart contract functionality that mainly supports crypto apps. This blockchain was designed to host these decentralized and scalable applications. It also focuses on having fast transactions with lower transaction fees compared to the other larger cryptocurrencies. Solana is a proof-of-stake blockchain but interestingly enough also implemented a new idea called proof-of-history.
Dogecoin
Market cap of $10 Billion
Dogecoin (DOGE) was founded in 2013 as a joke/meme coin and is open source like all the other coins mentioned above. Dogecoin is based on another fairly popular cryptocurrency Litecoin and uses the same proof-of-work technology. Dogecoin also has a loyal community of supports who trade it and use it as a tipping currency for social media content. The best part of DOGE is you get the support of Elon, any post made about the coin instantly increase the current price and if you HODL enough you might just be able to purchase a Tesla.
Polkadot
Market cap of $9 Billion
Polkadot (DOT) was introduced in 2017 using the Web3 Foundation. A nonprofit organization focusing on decentralizing internet infrastructure and technology. The goal of Polkadot is to facilitate communication between different blockchains. This is done by using three different chains inside of Polkadot, Relay chains, Parachains and Parathreads.
TRON
Market cap of $7 Billion
TRON (TRX) was established in 2014 and is a blockchain with smart contract functionality and proof-of-stake principles. TRON's blockchain gives a digital platform that is used primarily to host entertainment applications and has its own currency TRX. TRON aims to build a content subscription platform for content creators using blockchain technology.
Avalanche
Market cap of $6 Billion
Avalanche (AVAX) launched in 2020 as a protocol for solving consensus in a network of unreliable machines. The goal was to develop a blockchain network that would meet the complex finance industry requirements. Avalanche aims to prioritize scalability and transaction processing speed.
