The Cryptocurrency Universe Keeps Expanding

Bitcoin is the real cryptocurrency, and its great rise in today's world have just made it a viral topic in conversation for investors, alike media and technologists. And if seen the innovation of the blockchain is completely changing the markets, and causing problems and distortions with central banks and financial industry. When Bitcoin came up the market price was around US$ 2,400, a great increase from this time last year. But the true impact that Bitcoin is really fat more reaching than this, it helped to the birth of new markets for over 800 others currencies and other available assets that are for online trading. And while the bitcoin market stands for $40 Billion itself, and the rest are even more in combination.

Courtesy of :- Visual Capitalist

THE ALTCOIN UNIVERSE

For the first time when Bitcoin was founded which now makes the minority of the entire cryptocurrency market of about 41.6% of all available coins and assets.

But the question is, what are the other altcoins that make up the rest of this universe, and from where did they come from?

Litecoin

It is one of the first came altcoins, and it is just like Bitcoin after it was forked in 2011. It aims to process blocks upto 4 times faster than Bitcoin and to speed up transactions confirmation time. Though it creates several other challenges as well. Litecoin market capitalization is worth $2.1 Billion.

Ethereum

Launched in 2015, it is the largest coin market by capitalization aside from Bitcoin. And it is also quite different. Bitcoin designed to be a payment protocol first, whereas Ethereum enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications and also enabling smart contracts. The tokens used to power up this network are called Ether, yet can also traded online. Ethereum's market capitalization is $25.7 Billion.

Ripple

Also known as XRP is the native currency of Ripple Protocol, it is a broader catch-all for open source and global exchange. And is already being used by many banks as Santander, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, UBS and RBC. It helps with a lot of problems than what Bitcoin does, allowing to settle payments between different currencies and even different payment systems. It have market cap of $10.5 Billion.