In recent weeks, bitcoin has seen a huge surge in price and popularity, it is far from the only cryptocurrency making market gains. Just as there are several of currency including the the pound, US dollar and the euro , there are also many types of cryptocurrencies. Two of the biggest altcoins, other than bitcoin, are litecoin and ethereum and they have also surged in price along with bitcoin.
This speedy increase in trading volume has lead to outages across Coinbase, one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges. Ethereum buys and sells were temporarily disabled for about 40 minutes and litecoin trading was disable for about 90 minutes earlier today due to outages as demand level increases.
While bitcoin's market cap is nearly $300 billion, altcoins like ethereum and litecoin account for another $200 billion total. One of the potential reasons for this growth may be the skyrocketing transaction costs for bitcoin. They have jumped to over $25 per transaction while altcoins like litecoin only charge about 1% of that.