Bitcoin (BTC) touched another milestone on Wednesday, crossing the $12,000 mark for the first time ever. At 10:50 am Indian time (IST), BTC was ruling at $12,444 levels, acocording to data from industry website Coinmarketcap. The Cryptocurrency has rallied as much as 1193% to $12,452 so far in calendar year 2017 (CY17).
While Bitcoins got most attention, 2017 has been a remarkable year for other cryptocurrencies as well. Many alternative coins, aka altcoins, have outperformed Bitcoin.
For instance, Dash has risen up to 6,700% so far this year, data show.
Here are five altcoins that you must know about:
Ripple
Ripple, created in 2012, is not just a cryptocurrency (Ripple XRP), but also a payment network (RippleNet) of the same name. The currency has gained over 3,600% year-to-date, quoting a market capitalisation of $9,423,142,067 at $0.243246 price, according to website Coinmarketcap.
The RippleNet takes just about 4 seconds to process a transaction, while Bitcoin takes over an hour. The major difference between the two is while Bitcoins are still being mined, all Ripple coins are already in. The company itself owns about 61% or $16 billion worth of Ripple XRP.
Ether
Ether is another cryptocurrency that has given stupendous returns. The currency has skyrocketed over 5300% so far in 2017. The market cap of Ether is ruling at $43,779,079,841, quoting $455 per Ether, showed Coinmarketcap website.
Ether runs on the Ethereum network. Recently, a craze for virtual kittens on this medium and the resultant slowdown bared open one of the downsides of the cryptocurrencies i.e. a lack of scalability. Unprocessed ethereum transactions rose about six-fold since CryptoKitties was released on November 28, according to data provider Etherscan.
Litecoin
Litecoin could well be called the closest sibling of the Bitcoin as it was created as a hard fork of Bitcoin. Just last week, Litecoin hit its all-time high of $106.22, over 2300% gains since the beginning of the year when it ruled around $4, according to Coinmarketcap.
Litecoin was created in October 2011 by former Google engineer Charles Lee. Although the currency is far behind Bitcoin, but has an edge over it on processing small transactions. The currency’s payment platform processes a block every 2.5 minutes, which is a fraction of bitcoin’s 10-minute mark.
Dash
Dash is an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, which runs on a simple and cheap decentralised payment system. Dash's mission is to make digital cash easy to use and access for all users, even those who aren’t technologically savvy, claimed the official website.
The cryptocurrency surged the most among Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Ripple and Zcash, rising as much as 6700% to $764 year-to-date.
ZCash
ZCash was launched On October 28, 2016. The currency has gained over 600% to $350 so far in 2017. It is the first open, permissionless cryptocurrency that can fully protect the privacy of transactions using zero-knowledge cryptography, claimed ZCash’s official website.
With Zero-knowledge cryptography, one can prove a statement true without revealing anything about it other than that it’s true. Zero-knowledge proofs help make Zcash “untraceable” by creating private transactions on the public Zcash blockchain.
Bitcoin: Decoding the digital currency
Bitcoin: Decoding the digital currency