Coins
Crypto, one coin at a time.
Quick facts and short explainers for the tokens people search for. Sourced and dated.
Avalanche
Avalanche is a Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform that launched in September 2020. Its native cryptocurrency is AVAX, which is used to pay transaction fees and to help secure the network. The platform was built by Ava Labs, an American company co-founded by computer scientist Emin Gun Sirer, who came to the project from academic research on distributed systems. Avalanche set out to offer a fast, scalable base layer for building decentralized applications.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency and the largest by market value. It runs on a decentralized network of computers that records every transaction on a public ledger, the blockchain, with no bank or company in the middle. The pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the design in a 2008 paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," and mined the first block on January 3, 2009. Nakamoto's identity has never been confirmed.
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that split off from Bitcoin in 2017 over a long-running argument about how the network should grow. Like Bitcoin, it runs on a decentralized network that records transactions on a public blockchain using proof of work, and it shares Bitcoin's 21 million coin supply cap. What sets it apart is a deliberate choice to make blocks larger so the network can handle more payments at once.
BNB
BNB is the token tied to Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges. It started as a way to pay fees on the exchange at a discount, and that remains a core use. Holders who pay trading fees in BNB get a reduction, which gave the token a clear use from the start. Its role later grew, and today it also serves as the gas token for transactions on its own blockchain.
Cardano
Cardano is a public blockchain platform that runs on proof of stake and uses a cryptocurrency called ADA to pay for transactions. It is a smart contract platform, which means developers can build decentralized applications and finance services on it, the same broad category as Ethereum. The network went live in 2017. Its token is named after Ada Lovelace, the nineteenth-century English mathematician often credited as the first computer programmer.
Chainlink
Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network. It connects smart contracts to data and systems that live outside their own blockchain. A smart contract can only see what is recorded on its chain, so on its own it has no way to know a stock price, a sports result, the weather, or the value of one currency against another. Chainlink fills that gap by moving outside data onto the chain in a form a contract can read and act on.
Dogecoin
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that started as a joke and became the first meme coin. It uses the face of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu from the "doge" internet meme, as its logo and namesake. Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched it on December 6, 2013, partly to poke fun at Bitcoin and the wave of new coins making grand promises at the time. They built it to be light and approachable and marketed it as a "fun and friendly Internet currency."
Ethereum
Ethereum is the largest smart-contract platform in crypto, and for most of its life it has been the second-largest digital asset by market value behind Bitcoin. It launched in 2015, built by Vitalik Buterin and a small founding group, with a simple pitch that still defines it: a public blockchain that runs code, not just payments. That code, called a smart contract, executes the same way for everyone and cannot be quietly altered once deployed. Most of the activity people associate with crypto beyond holding coins, lending, trading, minting tokens, runs on Ethereum or on chains built to be compatible with it.
Hedera
Hedera is a public distributed ledger whose native token is HBAR. It does the kind of work people expect from a layer-1 network, recording transactions and running applications, but it does not use a traditional blockchain to get there. Instead of stringing transactions into a chain of blocks, Hedera uses a structure called a hashgraph to agree on what happened and in what order.
Litecoin
Litecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies still in use, built as a faster, cheaper companion to Bitcoin. It runs on its own decentralized network that records every transaction on a public ledger, the blockchain, with no bank or company in the middle. It is often described as silver to Bitcoin's gold.
Polkadot
Polkadot is a network built to let many separate blockchains work together. It is a decentralized, nominated proof-of-stake platform with smart contract support, and its main job is interoperability: letting independent chains exchange data and assets directly, without routing everything through a central party. Most blockchains run as islands that cannot easily talk to each other. Polkadot is designed to be the link between them.
Polygon
Polygon is a blockchain platform built to make using Ethereum faster and cheaper. It was created to address two specific problems on Ethereum: high transaction fees and slow processing. Polygon handles transactions on its own network and then commits them back to the Ethereum mainnet in batches, so users get lower costs and quicker confirmations while still anchoring to Ethereum's security. The aim is a multi-chain system that stays compatible with Ethereum rather than replacing it.
Shiba Inu
Shiba Inu is a meme coin built on Ethereum, named after the same Japanese dog breed that fronts Dogecoin. It launched in August 2020, created by an anonymous person or group using the pseudonym Ryoshi, and was pitched from the start as a Dogecoin competitor. The token uses the ticker SHIB.
Solana
Solana is a public blockchain built to run smart contracts and decentralized apps at high speed and low cost. Its native token is SOL, which is used to pay transaction fees and to stake, meaning holders can lock up tokens to help secure the network and earn rewards. The chain aims to handle large volumes of transactions quickly, which has made it a common home for trading apps, marketplaces, and other projects where speed matters.
Stellar
Stellar is an open-source network built to move money quickly and cheaply between different currencies and across borders. Its native token is the lumen, traded under the symbol XLM. The goal is to let a person send one type of value and have the recipient get another, so a payment can cross from one currency or asset to another in a single step. That focus on payments and remittances is what sets Stellar apart from networks aimed mainly at holding value or running complex applications.
Tether
Tether is the most-used stablecoin, a cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value of one US dollar per token. Its ticker is USDT. Tether Limited, the company behind it, issues the token and says each one is backed by its reserves, so the price tracks the dollar rather than swinging the way Bitcoin or other crypto assets do. The first tokens were issued on October 6, 2014, originally on the Bitcoin blockchain. Today USDT runs on many separate networks, including Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon, which means the same dollar-pegged token can move across several chains.
Toncoin
Toncoin is the native cryptocurrency of The Open Network, a public layer-1 blockchain. The token uses the ticker TON, and it pays for activity on the network in the way ether does on Ethereum. The Open Network runs on a proof-of-stake design, where holders lock up tokens to help confirm transactions and secure the chain rather than mining with hardware.
TRON
TRON is a Layer 1 blockchain built for smart contracts and decentralized applications. Its native cryptocurrency is Tronix, traded under the ticker TRX, which pays for transactions and network resources on the chain. Justin Sun founded TRON in 2017, and since that year it has been overseen by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit set up in Singapore. The pitch from the start was a platform for building and running apps without a central company controlling them.
USD Coin
USD Coin is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, built so that one USDC is redeemable for one US dollar. It is issued by Circle, a US-based company, and it is widely treated as the more transparency-focused alternative to Tether. Circle announced USDC on May 15, 2018, and it launched that September through Centre, a joint venture between Circle and the exchange Coinbase. In August 2023 the two firms wound down the Centre consortium and Circle took full control of the token. USDC began as an Ethereum ERC-20 token and now also runs on other networks, including Base and Polygon.
XRP
XRP is the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger, a public blockchain built for moving value quickly and cheaply. Its main job is payments and settlement. It is often used as a bridge currency, a neutral asset two parties can pass through to swap one currency for another without each holding the other directly. The ledger can also represent other units of value, such as tokens issued by a business.