4 Important Cryptocurrencies Other than Bitcoin

Bitcoin was the very first decentralized cryptocurrency that was created in 2009.

Although today the total number of cryptocurrencies have gone beyond 700, Bitcoin still remains to be one of the most popular one. That said, there are some cryptocurrencies that are giving it some tough competition in terms of popularity and liquidity benefits, etc.

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Let’s take a look at the top 4 of them:

1. Ethereum
   Although Ethereum was launched only two years back (2015), it’s growing by leaps and bounds in the market.
   Just like Bitcoin, Ethereum is distributed through a public block chain network. However, unlike Bitcoin miners who earn the cryptocurrency, Ethereum miners earn Ether instead, which is a crypto-asset held in your Ethereum Wallet and used to buy services within Ethereum.
2. Litecoin
   Also popularly referred to as the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold”, Litecoin is another major rival to Bitcoin that was launched in 2011.
   Although Litecoin is quite similar to Bitcoin in a way that it uses an open source global payment network and isn’t controlled by a central authority, it has a much faster block generation rate.
3. Ripple
   Launched in 2012, Ripple offers low-cost international payments across a fast global network. Since it works with a number of banks, it’s a major contributor to the growing economy.
   One of the things that make Ripple different from Ethreum or Bitcoin is that it doesn’t need mining which is also the reason why it’s network has small latency.
4. Monero
   Monero is a popular cryptocurrency that’s completely driven by its community and relies on donations. It’s regarded as one of the most secure and “untraceable” cryptocurrencies, which is mainly because of a technique it uses that’s called “ring signatures”.

Monero was launched in 2014 and is run by a group of 7 developers out of which only 2 have made themselves public.