The world of cryptocurrency is full of dozens upon dozens of altcoins all fighting for their market share. Due to the overwhelming amount of coins on the market its hard to decide which coins are worth looking into and which coins are simply scams. Today we feature the top 5 hottest cryptocurrencies on the market RIGHT NOW.

#5 Tether

Launched in late 2014 Tether is a cryptocurrency whose main focus is to keep a stable value. It works just like Bitcoin, but it has 2 major differences. First is the fact that each Tether (USDT) is pegged at $1 USD. If you look at Tether’s price chart you will see that it always has a value of $1. The way the currency accomplishes that is because every Tether is backed by a real US dollar. There is a trade off however for such a stable currency. If you would like to trade tether you need to provide some personal information to pass KYC / AML regulations.

The second difference is that Tether doesn’t have its own blockchain like most cryptocurrencies. Instead, it runs on the Omni Layer, which is a platform built on top of Bitcoin, allowing the issuance of digital tokens such as Tether. In a way, each Tether transaction is a Bitcoin transaction which is made through the Omni Layer. Tether’s market cap is ranked at number 21 and is at $14 million. If you are tired of the volatile crypto market and want to store some coins in a stable crypto asset, definitely look into Tether.

#4 Dash

Originally released in 2014 as Darkcoin, Dash is a re-brand of the cryptocurrency. It is a privacy centric project which was the first to use the X11 hashing algorithm, first created DarkSend, and also created the Dark Gravity Wave. This may sound like technical jargon but in short the X11 algorithm is just a modification to the SHA-256 mining algorithm that bitcoin uses. DarkSend is a feature which allows for a better obfuscation of transactions allowing for anonymous trade. Finally, the Dark Gravity Wave is a new way to adjust the mining difficulty. Unlike Bitcoin which adjusts its mining difficulty every 2016 blocks, DarkCoin uses the DGW algorithm to adjust it’s difficulty in an exponential fashion making a smoother difficulty adjustment.

In addition to the three above, there are much more features like InstantSend, Masternodes, and PrivateSend. Combine all those features with a dedicated development team and you get Dash. With a 24 hour trading volume of close to $2 million and a market cap of over $100 million Dash is definitely not going anywhere anytime soon. Currently each dash is worth $15 and the price seems to be on an uptrend.

#3 Monero

Just like Dash, Monero is also a privacy centric crypto, launched in 2014 under the name BitMonero. Unlike DarkCoin which used similar codebase to that of Bitcoin, Monero was the first fork off a crypto-note coin – Bytecoin. In short, the main difference between bitcoin and crypto-note based altcoins is that one implementation of the blockchain is much more opaque. To be more precise, one can follow any Bitcoin transaction through it’s blockchain, and one can see which addresses send what amounts. However, the way crypto-note implements it’s blockchain makes it impossible to trace transactions through it. It is only possible to learn the approximate amount of each transaction, but the origin or the precise amount is hidden.

Monero is not just a clone of Bytecoin, the developers were able to find quite a bit of flaws in Bytecoin’s code and were able to improve on it. As with Dash, a strong development team is the key to a coin’s success. Monero is ranked number 5 by market cap which is at a whopping $166 million, and each monero is worth roughly $12. The 24 hour volume is currently close to $3 million and the price is also currently on an uptrend.

#2 Ethereum / Ethereum Classic

Ethereum is both a currency and a platform. Initially proposed in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, in its simplest form it is a blockchain based application development system, think of it as an IDE, just like Eclipse or Visual Studio, in the cloud. It allows the creation of smart-contracts, which are agreements between two parties that are overseen by a computer program. It uses the Electrum Virtual Machine to allow for the creation of those smart contracts, and requires Gas (short for “Gasoline”) in order to execute those contracts and to prevent spam on the network.

The reason why there are two currencies, Ethereum and Ethereum class is due to the DAO fork in 2016 which caused the split. The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) was the first real attempt at creating a massive vehicle for autonomous investment capital management, and received close to $50 million in funding in the form of Ether. Unfortunately, it contained a terrible bug which allowed for any user to arbitrarily withdraw any amount of ethereum from the DAO and transfer it to another child DAO. After an anonymous attacker moved over $15 million in ether to the child DAO, the community came to a disagreement when it came time to fix the problem. Some wanted to revert the malicious transactions, while others thought that the rollback was unfair since the whole point of decentralized cryptocurrencies is that you cannot reverse transactions. This was the reason for the 2 forks, Ethereum reverted the theft from the DAO, while Ethereum Classic (ETC) kept rolling along. Ethereum Classic supporters believe:

“The core value proposition of any blockchain is immutability; valid transactions can never be erased or forgotten. Individuals interacting on Ethereum Classic are governed by this reality; Code is Law.”

Both ETH and ETC have healthy trading markets which are currently at an uptrend. Ethereum’s 24 hour volume is at $12 million and it is ranked number 2 by marketcap at $960 million. Ethereum Classic’s 24 hour volume is at $3 million with a market cap of $124 million.

#1 Bitcoin

Bitcoin needs no introduction, first created 8 years ago it has been the market leader ever since. Bitcoin’s market cap is a whopping $15 billion, more than 15 times its toughest competitor. After reaching an all time high earlier this month and plummeting right after, it seems that the market is recovering once again as prices peak $930. As always the safest cryptocurrency to trade with is Bitcoin as even though price fluctuations may be high, they will never be as high as some of these smaller cryptos.

If you are a cryptocurrency enthusiast the above 5 markets are all worth taking a look at, think of them as mutual stocks. They are safe investments compared to what else is out there, however one thing is for certain, out of all the cryptos Bitcoin is a must have in your portfolio. Also make sure to checkout this list for the 6 hilarious cryptocurrencies that are actually worth something.

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