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In May 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas. The coins were worth about $41 at the time. Nine years later, that same pile briefly touched a value in the hundreds of millions. The story usually gets retold as a cautionary tale about selling too early. It works better as a reminder of something simpler: bitcoin was the first functioning example of cryptocurrency, and nearly everything since has been a variation on the idea.
Since then the market has produced tens of thousands of tokens, most of which are noise. A handful are genuinely distinct, and knowing which is which changes how you read every price chart you'll ever look at. Here are concrete cryptocurrency examples, grouped by what they actually do, with the details that separate them. If you want the underlying mechanics first, this plain-English explanation of what digital money really is covers the ground well.
Bitcoin launched in January 2009, created by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. The supply is capped at 21 million coins, released on a schedule that halves roughly every four years. The most recent halving, in April 2024, dropped the block reward to 3.125 BTC. New blocks arrive about every ten minutes.
What makes bitcoin a useful reference point is how narrow its job is. It moves value between addresses without a bank in the middle. There are no smart contracts, no app layer, no governance votes. That simplicity is the whole pitch, and it's why bitcoin behaves more like a speculative store of value than like software you'd build on.
Ethereum went live in 2015 and added a programmable layer. Instead of only sending coins, you can deploy code that runs on thousands of machines at once. Fees, paid in ether (ETH), are called gas, and they rise when the network is busy. In September 2022 the network switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in an event called the Merge, cutting its energy use by roughly 99.9%.
Most tokens you'll encounter are not on their own blockchains. They're contracts running on Ethereum using a technical standard called ERC-20. USDC, Chainlink's LINK and Uniswap's UNI are all ERC-20 tokens. Because the standard is shared, any wallet can hold them without custom work. It's the closest thing crypto has to a universal plug shape.
Price swings are a problem if you want to actually use digital money for anything routine. Stablecoins solve it by tracking a reference asset, usually the US dollar.
Traders use stablecoins as a parking spot between positions. That usefulness is also where costs creep in, so it pays to know how to buy crypto without bleeding money on fees before you start moving dollars in and out.
These are separate blockchains built to beat Ethereum on speed or cost.
Solana (SOL) processes thousands of transactions per second and charges fractions of a cent, which made it the default home for a lot of trading and consumer apps. It has also suffered several full network outages, most painfully in 2022.
Cardano (ADA) took a slow, research-heavy route to launch and runs on a proof-of-stake design called Ouroboros. It's a bet on caution over speed.
Avalanche (AVAX) splits its architecture into separate chains for different jobs and lets projects spin up their own custom networks, called subnets.
Each one trades some degree of decentralisation for performance. This field guide to the main types of cryptocurrency goes deeper on where those trade-offs land.
Dogecoin started in 2013 as a joke. Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer forked Litecoin, swapped in a Shiba Inu logo, and set the block time to one minute. There's no supply cap: roughly 5 billion new DOGE enter circulation every year. It has outlasted most serious projects from its era.
Shiba Inu arrived in 2020, built on Ethereum by an anonymous developer using the name Ryoshi. It's a token with no protocol revenue and no cash flows. Both coins trade almost entirely on community attention, which means they can move 40% in a week on a single social media post and give it all back just as fast.
Bitcoin transactions are pseudonymous but permanently public. Anyone can trace them with enough patience.
Monero (XMR) makes privacy mandatory. Ring signatures blur the sender, stealth addresses hide the recipient, and amounts are concealed by default.
Zcash (ZEC) offers shielded transactions as an option using a cryptographic technique called zk-SNARKs, while still allowing transparent ones.
The catch is practical rather than technical. Regulatory pressure has led several major exchanges to delist privacy coins entirely, which hurts liquidity and makes them harder to exit.
Some tokens exist to power a specific product rather than to be money.
BNB pays for trading fees on Binance and runs on its own BNB Chain. Chainlink (LINK) pays node operators that feed real-world data into smart contracts, a service DeFi protocols depend on heavily. Uniswap (UNI) is a governance token; it was airdropped to around 250,000 early users in September 2020 and gives holders a vote on how the decentralised exchange is run. It does not pay a dividend or give you a claim on the protocol's revenue.
Once you know a coin's category, four questions do most of the work.
What does the token actually do? If the answer is nothing beyond being tradeable, that's a signal. Tokens that pay for network usage have a demand source. Tokens that only confer bragging rights don't.
Who holds the supply? A coin where the founding team and early insiders control 60% of the float faces steady selling pressure for years. Look for the vesting schedule before the price chart.
Can you get out? A coin with thin order books can drop 30% on a single sale. Deep liquidity on several exchanges matters more than a clever whitepaper, which is exactly the problem covered in this guide to selling cryptocurrency without losing value on the way out.
How is new supply released? Bitcoin's issuance is fixed and shrinking. Dogecoin's is fixed and permanent. A token with an unlimited inflation schedule needs constant new buyers just to hold its price steady.
Position sizing deserves the same scrutiny. Bitcoin and Ethereum are volatile enough that a 5% portfolio allocation can swing hard; a small-cap token with four exchange listings can go to zero without warning. If you're building a position for the first time, this practical start-to-finish guide to investing in cryptocurrency walks through sizing, custody and rebalancing in more detail.
The honest pattern across every example above is that the technology is rarely the hard part. Bitcoin works, Ethereum works, and USDC does exactly what it claims. What separates a durable coin from a cautionary one is usually boring: a real demand source for the token, a supply schedule that isn't rigged toward insiders, and enough liquidity that you can change your mind on a bad day. Judge each example on those three things and most of the market filters itself out.
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