After searching the google for almost five minutes, I was unable to find a good overview of different categories of Cryptocurrency projects. Setting out, the goal was to find a quick overview of what is different categories were available so a person could pick projects from different categories to better distribute their investments. I have heard this stock investors talk about doing similar things with their portfolio's in the past.
Strong as my Google-Fu is, my searches were fruitless. So, I am going to take a crack at providing you with such a list. Obviously, I will not be listing coins, there are far too many for me to take that project on alone. However, if you see value in this and find a coin or project you feel strongly should be listed, please let me know about it in the comments below.
Undoubtably, someone will be irritated that I have placed project x in category y, please make your case in the comments below. I'm not opposed to making changes if they are warranted.
Categories
- Currencies - Must have high degree of liquidity. Value is driven from use and scarcity (supply and demand).
- Store of Value - not suitable for micro transactions
- Privacy - projects with privacy built in
- Other - Me too coins
- Smart Contracts - Value is derived from contracts or other projects using the platform. Scarcity is maintained by burning small amounts of currency referred to as gas.
- Social Media
- Decentralized Organization / Business
- Shared Distributed Computing
- Peer to Peer Commerce - coins that enable person to person private transactions or exchanges
- Settlement Networks - bank interests
- Government Funded and Other Coins Without Utility and/or Scarcity - disgusting I know (perhaps we should label these "True Sh^t Coins")
(Links to the following can be found by searching for the name or ticker symbol on https://coinmarketcap.com/)
Currencies
Store of Value
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| BitCoin | BTC | First mover advantage, slow with high transactions fees. Commonly used as the reserve / exchange currency |
Privacy
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| DASH | DASH | Fast, has smart organization to pay developers/organization, master node holders and minors |
| Monero | XMR | Obscures details on Ledger |
| ZCash | ZEC | (pending) |
| ZenCash | ZEN | (pending) A fork of ZCash and ZClassic, private messaging and transactions |
Other
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| LiteCoin | LTC | One of the First BitCoin Forks, adopts proposed solutions and processes transactions faster than BitCoin |
Smart Contracts
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| Ethereum | ETH | First mover advantage |
| Ethereum Classic | ETC | Ethereum Fork |
| Ubiq | UBQ | Enterprise ready, stable fork of Ethereum |
| NEO | NEO | Formerly Ant Shares, developed in China with the aim to allow developers to create smart contracts with a variety of languages |
Social Media / Ecosystem
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| Steem | STEEM | Exchange Currency for SteemIt.com |
| Steem Backed Dollars | SBD | Rewards Currency for SteemIt.com |
| Basic Attention Token | BAT | Currency to enable safe distributed advertisement, rewards viewers of advertisement and content producers |
| LBRY | LBC | Designed to reward content producers; a free, open, community-run digital marketplace |
Decentralized Organization / Business
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| Aragon | ANT | Allows people to make digital organizations (built on Ethereum) includes it's own legal system. |
| Golem | GNT | Currently in development, will allow distributed GPU utilization in the near future |
| MaidSafe | MAID | Distributed Processing, Storage and Networking |
| Shift | SHIFT | Decentralized web |
| Sia | SC | Decentralized private cloud storage |
| StorJ | SJCX | Decentralized private cloud storage |
| iEx | RLC | Decentralized private cloud computing |
| SNOM | SNOM | Like Golem, but they are using current technologies. |
Peer to Peer Commerce
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| Swarm City | SWT | Currently in development, Boardwalk was released in June 2017 allowing people to exchange SWT for goods and services |
| Chronobank | TIME | Recruitment and labor based cryptocurrency designed to eliminate the third parties. |
Dividend Paying Investments
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| BlockChain Capital | BCAP | Like a mutual fund, token holders are rewarded from investments made into companies by VC investors. |
| DigixDAO | DGD | Allows holders to receive dividends when DGX (a soon to be released gold backed cryptocurrency is traded) |
| Iconomi | ICN | Invest and manage digital assets (semi centralized) |
| Melonport | MLN | Like Iconomi, only more decentralized and still under development. |
| Veritaseum | VERI | Enables peer to peer capitol markets |
Settlement Networks
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| BitShares | BTS | Decentralized financial service, banking and exchange |
| Ripple | XRP | Banking industry settlement network (possible sh^t coin?) |
| TokenCard | TKN | an Ethereum based debit card that will allow you to spend numerous coins |
Government Funded and Other Coins With No Utility (Sh^t Coins)
| Name | Ticker Symbol | Notes |
|---|
| Unknown | UNKNOWN | Coming soon to an ICO / Exchange near you. Seriously, if you know of any sh^t coins, let me know and I will post them here to warn others |
A big shout out goes to 
Hive account@crypt0, I listed many of the tokens he mentioned on his June 22nd, 2017 post
So how do you distribute your cryptocurrency holdings?
What projects did I miss that you are excited about?
