Altcoins are alternative coins, or any crypto asset that isn’t Bitcoin or a stablecoin. The largest altcoin by market capitalization is Ethereum.
Many other altcoins are built on top of Ethereum as an ERC20 token. However, thousands of altcoins now exist either running on other protocols or even mainnets of their own.
Altcoins vary greatly in price, use case, design, distribution, and more. Altcoins are often broken up into large cap altcoins or “majors,” mid cap altcoins, and small cap altcoins.
- Large cap altcoin examples include Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin, and Chainlink.
- Mid-cap altcoin examples include NEO, Nano, THETA, or Vechain.
- Small cap altcoin examples include Civic, Factom, FunFair, or Vertcoin.