Baby altcoins leading crypto rally as bitcoin goes mainstream

BITCOIN’S smaller cousins are out-pacing the largest cryptocurrency’s gains since major US exchanges started offering futures.

The biggest gainers among digital assets with at least US$ 1 billion ( RM4.2 billion) of market capitalisation in the past seven days are so- called alternative coins Verge, Tron, Qtum and Cardano, soaring at least 300 per cent.

Despite some wild price swings, bitcoin’s price is mostly flat since Cboe Group Markets Inc. and CME Group Inc. made the derivatives available in the past two weeks.

“People were really excited about the futures coming in and bitcoin really rallied leading up to that,” Joe Van Hecke, managing partner at Chicagobased Grace Hall Trading, said in a telephone interview from Charlotte, North Carolina. “Bitcoin’s been on a massive rally and the other coins are just now catching up as it takes a breather.

Additionally some positive press around some of them added to the rally.”

Here’s a primer on these lesser known digital tokens.

Most of them try to improve on the very things some see as positive in bitcoin; for those who don’t like to broadcast their transactions on a public blockchain, some platforms are offering untraceable transfers.

And if you’re uneasy with the fact that bitcoin can’t be easily regulated, there’s a coin to fix that too.

There’s even a blockchain-less cryptocurrency that tries to eliminate fees.

Verge aims to provide individuals and businesses with fast, efficient and decentralised transactions, which was bitcoin’s original purpose, but wants to improve on bitcoin by maintaining personal privacy, using anonymity centric networks such as Tor, obfuscating IP addressees and making transactions “completely untraceable,” according to its website.

Verge, with a market cap of US$ 1.07 billion, is up more than 1,000 per cent in the past week.

Tron, operated by the Singapore-based Tron Foundation, wants to build a “world-wide free content entertainment system” based on the blockchain, according to its website. — WP-Bloomberg