I’ll give popular coins a 1–5 star rating and follow up with a brief description on it. I’m going to still rate Bitcoin and Ethereum, so it can be used as comparison.
Bitcoin ($2600, 42 Billion MC)
A 43 Billion Dollar market cap makes this makes it the biggest crypto. It’s known as the Father of cryptocurrencies. It’s considered a store of value and also known as digital gold because there is a finite amount of coins. There’s also a lot of infrastructure built around it, some examples include: paying with bitcoin at cafes, paying on online websites, using a bitcoin debit card, and depositing and withdrawing at atms. The leading payment processing development kits, Braintree and Stripe, include bitcoin payments which makes it easy for developers to implement bitcoin into their app.
Ethereum ($268, 25 Billion MC)
It allows developers to code smart contracts on top of transactions. Ethereum has been the go-to crypto for developers to launch ICOs. Also, I’ve seen more job boards listing positions for Ethereum developers. Corporate support for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is growing after 86 firms including JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, CME Group, BNY Mellon joined the collective that is seeking to use blockchain technology to run smart contracts.
Ripple ($0.25, 10 Billion MC)
Ripple has had partnerships with over 70 banks. They are smaller then the ones backing ethereum. Examples are BBVA in Spain, MUFG in Japan, Akbank in Turkey, and SEB in Sweden. An interesting fact about Ripple is that all of their coins were pre-mined by the company and they still currently own over 50% of it. This makes Ripple a less traditional type of cryptocurrency and makes it feel more like an unregulated, overpriced security.
Litecoin ($50, 2.6 Billion MC)
Litecoin was first introduced by Charles Lee, a former employee of Google and former Director at Coinbase. A few weeks ago, he has stated on his Twitter that he will be leaving Coinbase to work on Litecoin full time. As a cryptocurrency, it’s stable and always a few steps ahead of bitcoin. It hopes to be your checkings account, making bitcoin your savings account. Litecoin’s trading volume has been significantly growing due to a lot of volume in China. Something to keep in mind is that Litecoin is no stranger to pump and dumps: In 2014, The price went from $50 to $3 where it was quite stable for around 3 years.
Next, we move to smaller market cap cryptocurrencies.
Monero ($50, 730 million MC)
The go-to cryptocurrency used for anonymous transactions. Monero is used on online darknet markets. They are a lot more low-key but have a strong developer community. Dash, another popular cryptocurrency, used to be known for their anonymity but experts began to criticize it’s cryptography and infrastructure. Dash decided to pivot and focus on their GUI and ease-of-use rather than privacy. Many say Monero is the only true fungible and anonymous coin.
Waves ($4.34, 434 million MC)
Waves is a platform where you could create custom tokens, similar to Ethereum. A notable ICO built on waves was PrimalBase, shared workspaces through cryptocurrencies. Waves is also approaching a solution for a decentralized Exchange. This has more potential as a use-case since Ethereum’s current network makes it a tough competitor. However, they’ve recently established a partnership with Deloitte which may get more of their customers building out ICOs on Waves.
AntShares ($7.86, 392 million MC)
China’s Ethereum. The idea is that for the Chinese to use an Ethereum-style blockchain, there would need to be a Chinese Ethereum. There may be some truth to this, since Facebook and Amazon were never able to become successful in China. And for this reason, I can see Chinese partnerships and development happening on AntShares over Ethereum.