Bitcoin is the Trailblazer and King of Cryptocurrency also known as the “Internet of Money”.  The success of Bitcoin has led to the exponential growth of the altcoins market such as Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Ripple, NEM, Litecoin, and Dash.  The first six months of 2017 has seen a spurt of growth from Bitcoin, Ethereum and various Altcoins that pushed the market cap over $100 billion collectively.

 The various cryptocurrencies are not all the same as they have different applications.  For example:- 

 BITCOIN – a store of value and payment system, the most valuable cryptocurrency 

 ETHEREUM – a programmable language and decentralized platform that runs smart contracts
 

 RIPPLE – a distributed financial technology enables banks to send real-time international payments across networks
 

 NEM – peer to peer cryptocurrency and blockchain software is used in a commercial blockchain called Mijin – working with financial institutions in Japan and internationally
 

 ETHEREUM CLASSIC – came into existence as a result of the DAO hard-fork – open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract
 

 LITECOIN – a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software and as a fork of the Bitcoin Core client
 

 DASH – an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency with capabilities such as nstant transactions (InstantSend), private transactions (PrivateSend), and decentralized governance (DGBB)
 

 Source – World Economic Forum