Altcoin

Altcoin is short for alternative coin. The term dates from the early 2010s, when Bitcoin was almost the whole market and everything else was an alternative to it. Today it covers thousands of projects, from large smart contract platforms like Ethereum and Solana to stablecoins, exchange tokens, memecoins, and tokens with almost no users at all.

Altcoins vary enormously in purpose and quality. Some introduce new technology, such as faster consensus or privacy features. Others are copies of existing projects with minor changes. Because they are smaller and less liquid than Bitcoin, altcoins usually rise more in bull markets and fall more in bear markets. A coin that gains 300 percent in a good year can easily lose 80 to 90 percent in a bad one.

Some people exclude Ethereum from the altcoin label because of its size, and others treat stablecoins as a separate category. In practice the word is loose, and it is more useful to ask what a specific project actually does than whether it is called an altcoin.