CRYPTO CURRENCIES

Bitcoin (BTC)

This is the one that started it all. Despite widespread community interest, the largest market cap among all cryptocurrencies and consistent public scrutiny, Bitcoin has held firm. It is the first decentralised digital currency that used a peer-to-peer network for transactions between users. Bitcoin’s growing user base and relatively large block time (the time taken for one block in the blockchain to be ‘mined’ by the miners that keep the blockchain up and running) have led to delays in transactions on the network and increasing transaction fees.

Litecoin (LTC)

Founded in 2011 by ex-Google employee Charlie Lee, Litecoin is often referred to as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. This is one of the go-to currencies used today for transactions, thanks to its faster block time of around 2.5 minutes, compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes, enabling much faster exchanges between users. Litecoin’s algorithm also makes it difficult to build Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC), the likes of which are used to mine Bitcoin, and have been criticised for the massive electricity consumption that goes into mining the cryptocurrency, leading to long-term scalability problems.

Ether (ETH)

Ether was until recently the second-largest cryptocurrency in terms of market cap. It is the cryptocurrency used in the Ethereum network, upon which ‘smart contracts’ can be built and executed. The main application for this platform is the use of smart contracts between parties, that usually require an intermediary for the purposes of trust or verification (such as the services performed by Airbnb or Uber). The potential real-world applications can be built by Ethereumblockchain, and the subsequent elimination of middlemen, have made it one of the hottest properties in the blockchain business, and have seen the price of Ether rise massively over the past few months.