What Is Altcoin?
Also known as: Alternative Coin, Alt Coin, Alts
In short
Altcoin is a general term for all cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin. It is short for alternative coin and covers thousands of different projects such as Ethereum, Solana and XRP.
After Bitcoin emerged in 2009 as the first cryptocurrency, new projects were developed aiming to offer different features. Early altcoins such as Namecoin and Litecoin were derived from Bitcoin's code; Litecoin, for example, uses a shorter block time and a different mining algorithm. Over time, altcoins serving very different purposes emerged, such as smart contract platforms, stablecoins, memecoins, governance tokens and gaming tokens.
Some sources distinguish assets with their own blockchain as coins and those running on another network as tokens; in everyday use, however, the term altcoin covers both. Although some investors think of Ethereum as a separate category, technically it is also an altcoin.
Most altcoins have a lower market capitalization and liquidity than Bitcoin, so their prices can be much more volatile. Among the thousands of projects are also some whose development has stopped, that have no user base, or that are fraudulent. For this reason, when evaluating an altcoin, its whitepaper, team, tokenomics and real use case should be researched.
Last updated: · This content is for information purposes only and is not investment advice.