Bitcoin has dominated the headlines this year, with massive value fluctuations, regulatory developments, and even Senate hearings by the US government. All these variables indicate that people are starting to take the young currency seriously.
But let’s not neglect about the option coins out there. 2013 has been a busy year for them, also. How have they fared? Even though CoinDesk has covered some of these alternative coins in depth already, it is fascinating to note which currencies have stood out from a market place capitalization point of view this year.
Right here are the six leading altcoins of 2013, primarily based on industry capitalization figures from Dustcoin.
Litecoin
Market cap (BTC): 788,023
Much like bitcoin, litecoin’s worth has fluctuated wildly over the last couple of months. The altcoin spike in March and April, in the course of the bitcoin bubble, demonstrated how closely linked litecoin is to the price tag of the incumbent top virtual currency. At the time, its value rocketed from around $ .05 to $ five.00.
In November, rates spiked again – but far greater this time, reaching around $ 48 for a brief period, just before gradually falling once far more. Now, following bitcoin’s fall in worth following China’s policy shifts on virtual currency, litecoin is hovering around the $ 22 mark.
All this interest in the currency has caused its difficulty to enhance, tripling in the final two months. Litecoin’s marketplace capitalization has also skyrocketed. On 16th November, its marketplace cap stood at around $ 95m. It might be on the identical roller coaster ride as bitcoin, but as of now, it nevertheless stands at a extremely respectable $ 573.9m or so.
Peercoin (PPCoin)
Marketplace cap (BTC): 126,411
Peercoin, the currency launched by the mysterious ‘Sunny King’, presently rests at just below one particular sixth the market place cap of litecoin, making it the third-largest coin in existence.
Peercoin makes use of proof-of-stake, an option to the conventional proof-of-operate mechanism utilised by bitcoin. It is developed to produce far more coins automatically, primarily based on the number of coins that a person currently has in their possession.
John Manglaviti, previously the neighborhood relations leader for feathercoin, came on board earlier this year to try and breathe life into peercoin’s community. Functioning with King (who focuses on technology improvement), he has recruited 120 volunteers for the currency. Most not too long ago, Canadian exchange Vault of Satoshi announced that it would help peercoin, lending more credibility to the currency.
Namecoin
Industry cap (BTC): 51,911
Namecoin is bouncing back from a nasty technical flaw it suffered late in 2013, which allowed any individual to take benefit of its domain naming system. The coin was made to allow folks to cryptographically shop and transmit pairs of keys and values, in a system that enabled it to develop a domain name program that was totally decentralized. Its best-level domain is ‘.bit’, and it is successfully a type of dark web.
The currency operates on a merged mining basis with bitcoin, which means that clients can be configured to verify both the bitcoin and the namecoin block chains when solving proof-of-work troubles.
Namecoin’s market place capitalization stands at a tiny under half that of peercoin.
Worldcoin
Market cap (BTC): 31,370
Worldcoin’s largest claim to fame this year may have been its involvement with phenixcoin and feathercoin in UNOCS, the abortive attempt to create a bridge in between these altcoins. Whilst phenixcoin subsequently imploded right after a prominent developer absconded with numerous peoples’ coins, worldcoin continues to forge ahead.
Its ambitions are also very clear, with a stated claim to turn out to be the “cryptocurrency of selection for merchants and consumers”, with a 60-second confirmation time.
Feathercoin
Market cap (BTC): 13,045
Feathercoin, itself a relative newcomer to the market place, was founded in April, and gained heavy traction as several people started mining and trading the currency.
With a industry cap of just over 13,000 BTC, feathercoin is still a relative featherweight compared to bitcoin, but there’s no denying that founder Peter Bushnell has done a excellent job of creating the coin. In turn, the community has gone from strength to strength.
Really, that’s not very accurate. It went from strength to relative weakness after UNOCS collapsed, but has because gone back to strength again, regaining some of its former enthusiasm below the new community leadership of Chris Ellis.
In addition to a weekly newsletter to preserve everybody abreast of events, there was also an Amsterdam conference. That itself was an fascinating story, simply because the Amsterdam bitcoin-based event conference that feathercoin members had been supposed to attend was reportedly canceled. So they just organized one more one particular, with both physical and virtual attendees. And it did so in just a couple of days.
This appears to be the story of feathercoin. It is a plucky little currency, with a really dedicated following, and in a position to climate apparently any storm, which includes the 51% attack that a person threw at it earlier in the year (Bushnell just purchased peercoin’s Sunny King on board and had him aid secure the block chain with a feature named sophisticated checkpointing, which was constructed into the client’s code).
Considering that it was launched, feathercoin has also established its personal nascent eBay-style marketplace, and there is now a Regional Feathercoins site, enabling individuals to trade coins directly with each other. A person is developing a physical version of feathercoin, potentially with an NFC reader embedded in it, and an additional enthusiastic developer is functioning on a proposal to place metadata in the block chain, to help with the transmission of files. There’s lots going on here.
Dogecoin
Industry cap (BTC): 10,421
Industry capitalization figures at Dustcoin show dogecoin in seventh location, just behind feathercoin. It’s a currency based around a meme, it’s been about for about five minutes, and has already been accepted by Cryptsy, which is now trading it. The price spiked at least 400% in mid-late December, and what’s exciting is how this bizarre phenomenon bucked the trend and continued to rise even following bitcoin’s value fell in the wake of the China fiasco. There are few other altcoins that can make that claim. Dogecoin’s worth and spot in this list did, however, slip after a Christmas holiday “hacking incident” that saw a total of 21m dogecoins disappear from customers’ wallets.
Dogecoins are becoming traded for bitcoins, which means they have a market cap which currently stands at ten,421 BTC, or a tiny over $ 7.8m at the time of writing. That’s partly due to the fact, whilst the value of the coins is nevertheless relatively low, there are a lot of them. At least an eighth of the coins (which a total limit of 100 billion), have already been mined. Not poor, for a currency primarily based on a dog joke.
 
Bitcoin may be the incumbent best virtual currency, but there is no doubt that there are a lot of option coins with a lot to provide, if nothing at all other than inspiring communities committed to their survival. It’s been a busy 2013. What will the subsequent year bring?
*All market place capitalization figures precise as of time of writing
View The Top Altcoins of 2013 on CoinDesk.
The Prime Altcoins of 2013
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