Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, but it is far from the only one. Everything that came after is loosely called an altcoin, short for alternative coin. A few of them do something genuinely different. Most of them do not.
This page walks through the categories you will actually run into, what each one is for, and a short checklist for judging any coin you hear about. It is education, not financial advice.
How many coins exist, and why most fail
Nobody knows the exact number, because creating a new token on a network like Ethereum or Solana takes minutes and costs a few dollars. As of 2026, the tracking site CoinMarketCap counts tens of millions of tokens ever created, while CoinGecko actively tracks roughly 17,000 that clear its listing rules. Analyses by both sites find that more than half of all coins ever launched are already dead: no trading, no development, no website.
They fail for ordinary reasons. Most were never meant to last; they were created to sell to buyers during a hype cycle. Others had a real idea but no users, or copied an existing coin without a reason to switch. A network is only worth using if other people use it, and very few coins ever reach that point.
Stablecoins: USDT and USDC
A stablecoin is a token designed to always be worth one US dollar. You hold it in a crypto wallet and send it over a network like Ethereum, but its price does not swing the way bitcoin’s does. Stablecoins exist so traders can park money between trades, and so people can move dollars across borders in minutes.
The two that matter are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. As of September 2026, all stablecoins together are worth roughly $300 billion, with USDT around $180 billion and USDC around $75 billion. Both issuers say every token is backed by an equal amount of cash and short-term US Treasury bills. Circle publishes monthly reports checked by a major accounting firm; Tether publishes quarterly reports from a smaller firm and has never had a full audit, which critics keep pointing out.
The risk with a stablecoin is not price swings but the issuer. If the backing is not really there, or the issuer freezes your tokens (both Tether and Circle can and do freeze addresses at law-enforcement request), the “stable” part fails. A stablecoin is an IOU from a company, and it is only as good as that company.
US stablecoin law as of 2026
In July 2025 the United States passed its first federal stablecoin law, the GENIUS Act. It requires issuers to be licensed, to back every token one-for-one with cash and Treasuries, to publish monthly reserve reports, and to honor redemptions. Regulators spent 2026 writing the detailed rules: the OCC proposed its version in February, the FDIC in April, and the Treasury in August. The law takes full effect in January 2027, or sooner if the final rules land early.
A second, broader bill covering exchanges and which agency regulates which coin, the CLARITY Act, passed the House in 2025 and a Senate committee in May 2026, but as of September 2026 it has not become law.
Litecoin and other bitcoin forks
Bitcoin’s code is public, so anyone can copy it, change a few settings, and launch a new coin. Litecoin, launched in 2011, did exactly that: faster blocks, four times as many coins, a different mining puzzle. It has survived as a payment coin that some merchants accept, but it never developed a reason to exist that bitcoin lacks.
Bitcoin Cash is a different kind of copy, called a fork. In August 2017, after a long argument about how big Bitcoin’s blocks should be, one group split the network and kept going with bigger blocks. Everyone who held bitcoin at that moment got an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash. The market has since valued it at a small fraction of bitcoin, which is the usual fate of forks: the name splits, but the users mostly stay put.
Solana
Solana, launched in 2020, is a smart-contract network like Ethereum but built for speed: thousands of transactions per second at fees of a fraction of a cent. It runs the same kinds of things Ethereum does, including stablecoins, trading apps, and a huge share of memecoins. Its trade-off is that running a node takes serious hardware, so fewer people do, and the network has had several full outages over the years, most recently in early 2024.
XRP
XRP dates from 2012 and is tied to a company, Ripple, that markets payment software to banks. The coins were created all at once, and Ripple still holds a large share, which is the opposite of bitcoin’s slow, public issuance. From 2020 to 2025 the SEC sued Ripple, arguing XRP was an unregistered security. A judge ruled in 2023 that sales to the public on exchanges were not securities while direct sales to institutions were; the case finally closed in August 2025 with Ripple paying a $125 million penalty.
BNB and exchange tokens
Some exchanges issue their own coin. BNB, created by Binance in 2017, is the biggest. Holding it gets you trading discounts, and it powers a Binance-run smart-contract network. Crypto.com’s Cronos token works the same way. The obvious point to keep in mind is that an exchange token’s value depends almost entirely on the exchange behind it, and Binance pleaded guilty to US money-laundering charges in 2023 and paid over $4 billion.
Memecoins: Dogecoin and everything after
Dogecoin was created in 2013 as a joke, a copy of Litecoin with a Shiba Inu dog on it. Its creators have said so plainly. Yet it has survived for over a decade, mostly as a symbol of not taking crypto too seriously, and it spikes whenever a celebrity mentions it.
Thousands of memecoins have followed, and since 2024 tools on Solana let anyone launch one in seconds. The pattern is the same every time: a coin with no purpose, a funny name, a burst of buying, and then a collapse as early buyers sell to late ones. Memecoins are closer to gambling than investing because the only way to make money is for someone else to pay more after you, and nothing about the coin itself gives them a reason to. Some people enjoy that. Just call it what it is.
How to evaluate any coin
You will hear about a new coin eventually. Before you take it seriously, ask these five questions.
- Who controls the supply? Bitcoin’s schedule is fixed and nobody can print more. If a company or foundation holds a big share or can change the issuance, they, not you, control the value.
- Who runs the nodes? A node is a computer that keeps a full copy of the ledger and checks every transaction. If only a few dozen machines do that, or all belong to one company, the “decentralized” label is marketing.
- What problem does it solve? Ask what people would do with it if the price never went up. If the answer is “nothing,” the price is the whole product.
- Is there real liquidity? Liquidity means you can sell without crashing the price. A coin traded on one small exchange can be impossible to exit when you want to.
- Is it a security? If a company sold the coin to raise money and buyers expect profit from that company’s work, US law may treat it as a security, which can mean lawsuits, delistings, and frozen trading. The Ripple case shows how long that can take to sort out.
If you’re new: start with bitcoin, maybe add some ether once you understand what Ethereum does, and skip the rest until you can answer the five questions above for yourself. Nothing on this page is financial advice; it is here so you know what you are looking at.