Ethereum

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.
These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property.

Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is a big enough platform that the makers behind Ethereum don’t need to do much marketing; with their custom built blockchain that runs smart contracts, and an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure, they are the second biggest digital currency on the market. However, Vitalik Buterin, who co-founded the currency writes a lot of blogs on Medium and is active on Twitter.

Ripple

Today the world sends more than $155 trillion* across borders. Yet, the underlying infrastructure is dated and flawed. Ripple connects banks, payment providers and digital asset exchanges via RippleNet to provide one frictionless experience to send money globally.

Ripple has gotten buy-in with financial institutions such as UniCredit, UBS and Santander because of its speed and the stability of the technology, bridging fiat currency with cryptocurrency. Partnering with some of Europe’s biggest banks helps promote Ripple not only to institutional investors but the average user as well, giving it great exposure.

EOS

EOS uses a “Delegated Proof of Stake” (DPOS) system, which supposedly improves on the regular PoS system because users can delegate their voting rights to others in the network in order to decrease transaction verification times and make the network run more efficiently.
EOS also separates read and write actions to increase speed and enables public and private blockchains to communicate asynchronously. Instead of long addresses, users of the platform can also create account names, and those accounts can have different permission levels.

Called the Ethereum killer, EOS was launched in 2017 and stands as one of the most valuable cryptocurrency coins. With its ability to separate read and write actions to increase speed and enables public and private blockchains to communicate asynchronously; they are looking at partnering with Tesla which would be a great cross promotion for the two companies.

Cardano

Cardano is a decentralised public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source. Cardano is developing a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed. It is the first blockchain platform to evolve out of scientific philosophy and a research-first driven approach. The development team consists of a large global collective of expert engineers and researchers.
Cardano is a new cryptocurrency that comes with some interesting new innovations. It was built by a team of technology-focused developers and academics from multiple universities. One of these innovations is that the code was written in Haskell, a more memory-safe programming language, which should minimize the existence of bugs on the Cardano network.

The people behind Cardano are doing an excellent job of building a community with social media and excellent customer support, including chat and forums on Reedit. It’s much easier to create advocates who rave about your currency when you do such an amazing job of supporting those who use it. Acquiring loyal members from promoting their unique scientific philosophy and research approach, and memory-safe coding for secure network communications.

Stellar Lumens

Stellar Lumens is a cryptocurrency similar to Ripple and aims to become the de facto cryptocurrency system used by banks and other financial institutions. The “lumens” are the currency units that exist on the Stellar network.
The developers behind the Stellar network believe that lumens could eventually be used as a “bridge” between different cryptocurrencies. However, to exchange between cryptocurrencies, you’d have to trust a third-party “anchor,” similar to how you trust a cryptocurrency exchange to convert your money from one currency to another. The main difference seems to be that these anchors will live on the Stellar network.

Recently, IBM announced a partnership with Stellar to enable banks to complete instant cross-border transactions with each other, which seems to have propelled Stellar Lumens back into the top 25 cryptocurrencies. IBM will use its own custom blockchain solution for much of the transaction clearing, but the transaction settlement will be done on the Stellar network.

IOTA

IOTA is a cryptocurrency technology that targets the Internet of Things (IoT) and doesn’t use a blockchain in order to reduce the computational needs of the network and eliminate transaction fees.
IOTA’s breakthrough ledger technology is called “Tangle,” wherein the Sender in a transaction is required to do a proof of work that approves two transactions. This removes dedicated miners who are needed to verify transactions on most other cryptocurrencies. It also makes the system more decentralized because every user essentially becomes a “node” in the network.
Another remarkable thing about IOTA is that it becomes faster the more users perform transactions because all of those users are also required to verify other transactions. This is the opposite of most other cryptocurrencies that tend to become slower as more people use them and require new solutions to increase scalability.

As one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies in the form of market capitalization, like a lot of digital coins, IOTA builds there marketing right into their product. With no transaction fees thanks to “Tangle”, this cryptocurrency is bound to increase in popularity with little traditional marketing. In fact, all things being equal, there is really no competitor for IOTA. They also have a robust social media feed that gives them good reach.

TRON

TRON is the first cryptocurrency built on top of the Ethereum blockchain as a standard ERC20 token to have 10 million wallet users. TRON’s purpose is to be an open source platform for the global digital entertainment industry by providing functions of payment, development, storage, and credit sharing.
Texts, pictures, videos, and live broadcasts could all be distributed on the Tron blockchain. People who play games that support the TRON platform will also be able to freely exchange their in-game credits with each other.

TRON has hopes of aligning itself with China’s biggest online shopping store, Alibaba. Some of TRON’s senior programmers have been recruited from the shopping giant in hopes that TRON will be a major currency traded in China. This plan hit a snag when China banned all cryptocurrency in 2017.

NEO

NEO, previously called “Antshares,” is often called the “Chinese Ethereum” because it has many of the same goals as Ethereum and is developed in China, unlike the majority of other cryptocurrencies that are developed in the U.S. or Europe. Being in China may also give it some advantages due to potentially improved relationships with both regulators and local Chinese businesses that may prefer adopting it over a Western cryptocurrency.
NEO is a smart contract platform that enables all sorts of financial contracts and even third-party distributed applications to be developed on top of it, much like Ethereum. Unlike Ethereum, where developers can only use its own JavaScript-like “Solidity” programming language, NEO allows developers to use any coding language they like.
NEO like TRON hopes to conquer the Chinese market. Unlike the majority of other cryptocurrencies that are developed in the U.S. or Europe, NEO is developed within China. Although China currently outlaws cryptocurrency, if there ever was a digital currency to break through it would be NEO, making it extremely valuable.

Monero

Monero is one of the private transactions-capable cryptocurrencies with the most active communities because of its open and privacy-focused ideals. Many consider it the most private cryptocurrency, especially after a recent Europol bust where the only cryptocurrency transactions that couldn’t be traced were Monero transactions.

Monero’s privacy is guaranteed by a ring signature algorithm, which means that the coins are “mixed” at the protocol level, which according to Monero developers, makes transactions “untraceable.”
Monero’s coins are also fungible, which means there won’t be any way for an exchange or for vendors to block certain Monero coins. All Monero coins will be interchangeable with others.
Their marketing can be seen right on their homepage which plasters all their tweets and other social marketing.

Litecoin

Litecoin was one of the very first “altcoins” to be created with the goal of being the “digital silver” to Bitcoin’s digital gold. Litecoin was also a fork of Bitcoin (as many cryptocurrencies were in the early days), but it could generate blocks four times faster and have four times the maximum number of coins (84 million).
It also uses a different mining algorithm, called “scrypt,” compared to Bitcoin, which uses SHA256. This gives Litecoin a mining decentralization advantage because people only need GPUs to mine Litecoin, as opposed to Bitcoin, where ASICs are required these days for any sort of mining reward.

Litecoin was one of the very first “altcoins” to be created with the goal of being the “digital silver” to Bitcoin’s digital gold. Recently, the original developer of Litecoin, Charlie Lee committed to working full time on the cryptocurrency in 2017. He has expertly used interviews and other traditional PR techniques to promote Litecoin as an alternative to Bitcoin. He also set a mission for Litecoin to become a mature cryptocurrency where new innovations could be tested out before Bitcoin adopts them, too. This would make it safer for Bitcoin to adopt new technologies while also raising the importance of Litecoin on the market.