10 Cryptocurrencies by social activity

Top 10 cryptocurrencies by social activity according to Cryptorank

Bitcoin (BTC)

The world’s first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is stored and exchanged securely on the internet through a digital ledger known as a blockchain.

BTC is the world’s most traded cryptocurrency, representing a huge slice of the crypto market pie. It was the first digital coin and, as such, remains the most famous and widely-adopted cryptocurrency in the world. The original gangster in whose footsteps all other coins must follow. The birth of Bitcoin was the genesis for an entirely new asset class, and a huge step away from forms of centralized control. Today, many advocates believe Bitcoin will be the inevitable future for the entire global financial system, although this – of course – remains to be seen.

It is a decentralized digital currency that is based on cryptography. As such, it can operate without the need of a central authority like a central bank or a company. It is unlike government-issued or fiat currencies such as US Dollars or Euro in which they are controlled by the country’s central bank. The decentralized nature allows it to operate on a peer-to-peer network whereby users are able to send funds to each other without going through intermediaries.

Bitcoin was originally described in a 2008 whitepaper by a person, or group of people, using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. It was launched soon after, in January 2009.

BTC is a peer-to-peer online currency, meaning that all transactions happen directly between equal, independent network participants, without the need for any intermediary to permit or facilitate them. Bitcoin was created, according to Nakamoto’s own words, to allow “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

Some concepts for a similar type of a decentralized electronic currency precede BTC, but Bitcoin holds the distinction of being the first-ever cryptocurrency to come into actual use.

Bitcoins are divisible into smaller units known as satoshis — each satoshi is worth 0.00000001 bitcoin.

Ethereum(ETH)

Ethereum – the world’s second-most famous blockchain network – is a platform for creating decentralized applications based on blockchain and smart contract technology (a command that automatically enforces the terms of the agreement based on a given algorithm). Its cryptocurrency is listed under the symbol ETH and is also used for various transaction costs on the Ethereum network, such as gas fees (which can be infamously high at times).

Ethereum is a global, open-source platform for decentralized applications. In other words, the vision is to create a world computer where anyone can build applications in a decentralized manner; while all states and data are distributed and publicly accessible. Ethereum supports smart contracts in which developers can write code in order to program digital value. Examples of decentralized apps (dapps) that are built on Ethereum include token, non-fungible tokens, decentralized finance apps, lending protocol, decentralized exchanges, and much more.

Ethereum was first described in a 2013 whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin. Buterin, along with other co-founders, secured funding for the project in an online public crowd sale in the summer of 2014. The project team managed to raise $18.3 million in Bitcoin, and Ethereum’s price in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) was $0.311, with over 60 million Ether sold. Taking Ethereum’s price now, this puts the return on investment (ROI) at an annualized rate of over 270%, essentially almost quadrupling your investment every year since the summer of 2014.

The Ethereum Foundation officially launched the blockchain on July 30, 2015, under the prototype codenamed “Frontier.” Since then, there has been several network updates — “Constantinople” on Feb. 28, 2019, “Istanbul” on Dec. 8, 2019, “Muir Glacier” on Jan. 2, 2020, “Berlin” on April 14, 2021, and most recently on Aug. 5, 2021, the “London” hard fork.

Ethereum’s own purported goal is to become a global platform for decentralized applications, allowing users from all over the world to write and run software that is resistant to censorship, downtime and fraud.

Ethereum 2.0 (The Merge)

In 2022, Ethereum plans to switch to proof-of-stake with its Ethereum 2.0 update. ETH 2.0 is an upgrade that aims to solve the blockchain trilemma — security, scalability, and decentralization. In alternative smart contract platforms, they are designed to be highly scalable but compromises on decentralization. Whereas a highly secured and decentralized blockchain network would have the trade off being highly unscalable. Ethereum 2.0 brings a very different flavor of design that aims to addresses those issues by way of using Proof-of-Stake (POS), Beacon Chain, Sharding, and Execution Environment. Due to the complexity of the project, the development will take place in 3 phases. A Proof-of-Stake Beacon Chain has been deployed and users are staking their ETH as a sign of confidence in the upcoming network. Research and development are still in progress to roll out the remaining phases.

This switch has been in the Ethereum roadmap since the network’s inception and would see a new consensus mechanism, as well as introduce sharding as a scaling solution.

In late 2021, Ethereum’s Arrow Glacier update was delayed to June 2022. Until then, Vitalik Buterin expects the road to the network’s endgame to be shaped by optimistic rollups and Zk-rollups.

Zcash (ZEC)

ZCash is a relatively new cryptocurrency that’s based on the idea of complete anonymity with regard to transaction details. It utilizes a zero-knowledge protocol which validates transactions, meaning the algorithm ensures that one party can prove to another party that the statement is true without transmitting information about the proof itself.

Zcash is a decentralized cryptocurrency focused on privacy and anonymity. It uses the zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proof technology that allows nodes on the network to verify transactions without revealing any sensitive information about those transactions.

Zcash is based on peer-reviewed cryptographic research, and built by a security-specialized engineering team on an open source platform based on Bitcoin Core’s battle-tested codebase. Our improvement over Bitcoin is the addition of privacy. Zcash uses advanced cryptographic techniques, namely zero-knowledge proofs, to guarantee the validity of transactions without revealing additional information about them.

Contrary to a common misunderstanding, the majority of cryptocurrencies on the market, including Bitcoin (BTC), are not anonymous, but rather pseudonymous; while they do not explicitly reveal the identities of their users, each user has their own public address or addresses which can be traced back to them via the methods of data science and blockchain forensics.

Zcash transactions, on the other hand, still have to be relayed via a public blockchain, but unlike pseudonymous cryptocurrencies, ZEC transactions by default do not reveal the sending and receiving addresses or the amount being sent. There is an option, however, to reveal this data for the purposes of auditing or regulatory compliance.

Zcash was first released on October 28, 2016, and it was originally based on Bitcoin’s codebase.

Dogecoin (DOGE)

Dogecoin (DOGE) was created in 2013 as a lighthearted alternative to traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The Dogecoin name and Shiba Inu logo are based on a meme. Unlike Bitcoin, which is designed to be scarce, Dogecoin is intentionally abundant — 10,000 new coins are mined every minute and there is no maximum supply.

Dogecoin (DOGE) is based on the popular «doge» Internet meme and features a Shiba Inu on its logo. The open-source digital currency was created by Billy Markus from Portland, Oregon and Jackson Palmer from Sydney, Australia, and was forked from Litecoin in December 2013. Dogecoin’s creators envisaged it as a fun, light-hearted cryptocurrency that would have greater appeal beyond the core Bitcoin audience, since it was based on a dog meme. Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted several tweets on social media that Dogecoin is his favorite coin.

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that was created on December 6th, 2013 based on the popular «Doge» Internet meme and features a Shiba Inu on its logo.

The codebase of the project was a fork of Litecoin, in which most of the same features such as hash hashing algorithm were inherited, with the only difference of branding and large inflationary supply.

Introduced as a «joke currency», Dogecoin quickly developed its own online community and reached a capitalization of US$60 million in January 2014. Compared with other cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin had a fast initial coin production schedule: 100 billion coins were in circulation by mid-2015, with an additional 5.256 billion coins every year thereafter. As of 30 June 2015, the 100 billionth Dogecoin had been mined.

Developers wanted to create a fun cryptocurrency that will appeal beyond the core Bitcoin audience. Dogecoin is primarily used as a tipping system on Reddit and Twitter where users tip each other for creating or sharing good content. The community is very active in organizing fundraising activities for deserving causes.

The developers of Dogecoin haven’t made any major changes to the coin since 2015. This means that Dogecoin could get left behind and is why Shibas are leaving Dogecoin to join more advanced platforms like Ethereum. One of Dogecoin strengths is its relaxed and fun-loving community. However, this is also a weakness because other currencies are way more professional.

Dogecoin in 2022

Fast forward today in 2022, Dogecoin has grown so much and has gathered mainstream attention. It has become a meme that is used by the likes of Tesla billionaire, Elon Musk and even more so spunned off even more meme coins into the market.

Dogecoin followers have always been asking if Dogecoin would ever reach $1. It is hard to say where the price action will go, but high volatility seems to be mainstay as the utility of the cryptocurrency remains unclear being a meme coin.

Tezos (XTZ)

Tezos is a blockchain network that’s based on smart contracts, in a way that’s not too dissimilar to Ethereum. However, there’s a big difference: Tezos aims to offer infrastructure that is more advanced — meaning it can evolve and improve over time without there ever being a danger of a hard fork. This is something that both Bitcoin and Ethereum have suffered since they were created. People who hold XTZ can vote on proposals for protocol upgrades that have been put forward by Tezos developers.

This open-source platform bills itself as “secure, upgradable and built to last” — and says its smart contract language provides the accuracy that is required for high-value use cases. According to Tezos, its approach means that it is futureproof and will “remain state-of-the-art long into the future,” meaning it can embrace developments in blockchain technology.
The technology underpinning Tezos was first proposed in a white paper that was released in September 2014. After a series of delays, the Tezos mainnet launched four years later.

ApeCoin (APE)

ApeCoin is an ERC-20 governance and utility token used within the APE Ecosystem to empower and incentivize a decentralized community building at the forefront of web3.
ApeCoin holders govern themselves via the decentralized governance framework controlling the ApeCoin DAO, and vote on how the ApeCoin DAO Ecosystem Fund should be used. The APE Foundation administers proposals agreed upon by ApeCoin holders.

Shiba Inu (SHIB)

Once upon a time, there was a very special dog. That dog was a Shiba Inu, and this dog inspired millions of people around the world to invest money into tokens with the dog’s image on it.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a meme token which began as a fun currency and has now transformed into a decentralized ecosystem. During the initial launch, 50% of the supply was allocated into Vitalik Buterin’s ethereum wallet. The price of SHIB has soared from as low as $0.000000000056 to an all time high of $0.000084, that is a 150,000 times increase within 8 months.

As a result of that, Vitalik proceeded to donate 10% of his SHIB holdings to a COVID-19 relief effort in India and the remaining 40% is burnt forever. That donation was worth about $1 billion at that time, which makes it one of the largest donations ever in the world.

Right now in 2022, Shiba Inu coin has captured mainstream attention as a meme coin. On Oct 28th, 2021, the cryptocurrency reached an all-time-high price of $0.000084. That was a +150,000,000% increase from when it was launched in August 2020.

Looking at the overall chart, Shiba Inu grew at a faster rate and has overtaken Dogecoin in terms of market cap. Both are running the narrative as the dominant global meme coin and very volatile as there is no utility other than speculation and for transaction purposes.
The rapid rise of Shiba Inu coin price has gotten a lot of crypto analysts and experts concerned about an incoming massive correction.

According to the SHIBA INU website, SHIB is the «DOGECOIN KILLER» and is listed on their own ShibaSwap, a DEX. Shiba Inu coin was created anonymously in August 2020 under the pseudonym «Ryoshi.» Ryoshi says about himself that he is a nobody and not important and that the efforts to unmask his identity, even if successful, would be underwhelming.

This meme coin quickly gained speed and value as a community of investors was drawn in by the cute charm of the coin paired with headlines and tweets from personalities like Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin. Vitalik Buterin was long believed to be the originator of Shiba Inu, but denied such rumors on the Lex Fridman podcast on June 5, 2021.

Shiba Inu aims to be the Ethereum-based counterpart to Dogecoin’s Srypt-based mining algorithm. Shiba Inu and the SHIB token are part of a swarm of dog-themed cryptocurrencies, including Baby Dogecoin (BabyDoge), Dogecoin (DOGE), JINDO INU (JIND), Alaska Inu (LAS) and Alaskan Malamute Token (LASM). These lesser-valued tokens have attracted investors who missed the Dogecoin pump from 0.0002 to nearly 0.75 USD.

Shiba’s success sparked an avalanche of copycats, such as BitShiba, Shiba Fantom, Shibalana, King Shiba, SHIBAVAX, Captain Shibarrow, SHIBA2K22, SpookyShiba and countless others. In total, there may be well over 100 Shiba Inu copies, and the number keeps rising constantly.

On September 17, 2021, Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based crypto exchange, listed Shiba Inu on their platform. This news caused Shiba Inu price to rise by over 40% in the following two days, bringing the meme dog token into the spotlight again.

Shiba Inu has since attracted more interest from other exchanges as well. Bitso, Mexico’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, announced in September that SHIB would start trading on its exchange. Giottus, an Indian crypto exchange, announced the same. Bitstamp, the biggest crypto exchange in Europe, said that it would list Shiba Inu for trading at the beginning of 2022. Korbit, a South Korean exchange, became the country’s first exchange to list the SHIB token in 2021.

Cardano (ADA)

Cardano is the first protocol to incorporate Ouroboros, the groundbreaking proof of stake algorithm. The IOHK team employed a “first-principles” approach, driven by peer-reviewed academic research to build Cardano from the ground up.

Cardano is one of the biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap. It’s designed to be a next-gen evolution of the Ethereum idea — with a blockchain that’s a flexible, sustainable, and scalable platform. Cardano aims to enable smart contracts, which will allow developers to build a wide range of decentralized finance apps, new crypto tokens, games, and more. According to the creators of Cardano, “Ouroboros is the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol… more secure, scalable, and energy-efficient than anything that has come before.”

The Cardano blockchain is divided into two separate layers: the Cardano Settlement Layer (CSL) and the Cardano Computing Layer (CCL). The CSL contains the ledger of accounts and balances (and is where the transactions are validated by the Ouroboros consensus mechanism). The CCL layer is where all the computations for apps running on the blockchain are executed — via the operations of smart contracts. The idea of splitting the blockchain into two layers is to help the Cardano network to process as many as a million transactions a second.

Unlike Ethereum-based tokens, Cardano native tokens aren’t created via smart contract. Instead, they run on the same architecture as the ADA cryptocurrency itself. According to the nonprofit Cardano Foundation, this makes Cardano native assets “first-class citizens” on the blockchain. Their native architecture can theoretically make these tokens more secure and reduce the fees associated with transactions.

Cardano was mentioned in 30,292 out of 2,195,783 social media posts on Twitter and Reddit on Apr 30, 2022. 22,186 unique individuals are talking about Cardano and it is ranked #13 in most mentions and activity from collected posts.

Cardano was founded back in 2017, and named after the 16th century Italian polymath Gerolamo Cardano. The native ADA token takes its name from the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace, widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. The ADA token is designed to ensure that owners can participate in the operation of the network. Because of this, those who hold the cryptocurrency have the right to vote on any proposed changes to the software.

The team behind the layered blockchain say that there have already been some compelling use cases for its technology, which aims to allow decentralized apps and smart contracts to be developed with modularity.

In August 2021, Charles Hoskinson announced the launch of the Alonzo hard fork, causing Cardano price to surge, gaining 116% in the following month. On Sept. 12, 2021, the Cardano ‘Alonzo’ hard fork officially launched, bringing smart contract functionality to the blockchain. Over 100 smart contracts were deployed in the following 24 hours after the launch.

Cardano is used by agricultural companies to track fresh produce from field to fork, while other products built on the platform allow educational credentials to be stored in a tamper-proof way, and retailers to clamp down on counterfeit goods.

Solana (SOL)

Solana is a decentralized computing platform that uses SOL to pay for transactions. Solana aims to improve blockchain scalability by using a combination of proof of stake consensus and so-called proof of history. As a result, Solana claims to be able to support 50,000 transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization.

Solana is a highly functional open source project that banks on blockchain technology’s permissionless nature to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. While the idea and initial work on the project began in 2017, Solana was officially launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

Like Ethereum, Solana is both a cryptocurrency and a flexible platform for running decentralized apps (dapps) — everything from Degenerate Apes to the Serum decentralized exchange (or DEX). Its major innovation is speed, via a bundle of new technologies including a consensus mechanism called proof of history (PoH). Solana can process around 50,000 transactions per second — compared to 15 or less for Ethereum (the ETH2 upgrade, which is currently underway, is designed to make Ethereum much faster than it is now).

Because Solana is so fast, congestion and fees remain low. Developers hope high speeds and low fees will eventually enable Solana to scale to compete with centralized payment processors like Visa.

Solana’s native cryptocurrency is SOL, which is used to pay transaction fees and for staking. It also gives holders the right to vote in future upgrades. SOL is available to buy and sell via exchanges like Coinbase.

The Solana protocol is designed to facilitate decentralized app (DApp) creation. It aims to improve scalability by introducing a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.

Because of the innovative hybrid consensus model, Solana enjoys interest from small-time traders and institutional traders alike. A significant focus for the Solana Foundation is to make decentralized finance accessible on a larger scale.

Solana crypto is a high throughput blockchain based on the Proof of History (PoH) and Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus. Built by a team of networking engineers, Solana aims to become the blockchain infrastucture for modern internet applications.

Solana crypto price experienced a hyperbolic growth in 2021. With the advent of multichain and increased adoption of DeFi and NFT, Solana managed to capture a large market share. Developers were attracted by the technical underlying and started building dapps such as Star Atlas, Mercurial, Orca, Saber, and more. Yield farming on Solana caught on shortly after that as a way to attract liquidity and activities to the network. In 2022, it remains to be seen if Solana and its ecosystem of dapps is able to capture market share.

While Solana has been on a high note, it did experience some setbacks with network outages lasting as long as over 16 hours on September 15th, 2021. The Solana team and node operators coordinated a reset in order to revive the network. Despite that, Solana coin managed to remain steady above $150 after the incident occured.

What makes Solana unique?

When Bitcoin was invented more than a decade ago, it solved a tricky problem: how to make it possible for strangers anywhere in the world to make financial transactions over the internet without financial intermediaries and payment processors like Visa or Mastercard assisting the transaction.

The technology that makes decentralized transactions possible — and which created the universe of cryptocurrencies we now know — is called a blockchain. But, blockchains previously had one major downside compared to centralized networks like the ones credit-card companies use: they’re slower. As of August 2021, Ethereum typically processes fewer than 15 transactions per second, compared to tens of thousands for Visa’s network.

Solana is one of many new crypto solutions aiming to make crypto networks faster and more scalable. It uses a suite of clever technologies, including a novel mechanism called “proof of history.”

Polygon (MATIC)

MATIC, the native token of Polygon, is an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain. The tokens are used for payment services on Polygon and as a settlement currency between users who operate within the Polygon ecosystem. The transaction fees on Polygon side chains are also paid in MATIC tokens.

Polygon (previously Matic Network) is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building multiple types of applications.

Using Polygon, one can create optimistic rollup chains, ZK rollup chains, stand alone chains or any other kind of infra required by the developer.

Polygon effectively transforms Ethereum into a full-fledged multi-chain system (aka Internet of Blockchains). This multi-chain system is akin to other ones such as Polkadot, Cosmos, Avalanche etc. with the advantages of Ethereum’s security, vibrant ecosystem and openness.

The $MATIC token will continue to exist and will play an increasingly important role, securing the system and enabling governance.

Polygon (formerly Matic Network) is a Layer 2 scaling solution backed by Binance and Coinbase. The project seeks to stimulate mass adoption of cryptocurrencies by resolving the problems of scalability on many blockchains.

Polygon combines the Plasma Framework and the proof-of-stake blockchain architecture. The Plasma framework used by Polygon as proposed by the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, allows for the easy execution of scalable and autonomous smart contracts.

Nothing will change for the existing ecosystem built on the Plasma-POS chain. With Polygon, new features are being built around the existing proven technology to expand the ability to cater to diverse needs from the developer ecosystem. Polygon will continue to develop the core technology so that it can scale to a larger ecosystem.

Polygon boasts of up to 65,000 transactions per second on a single side chain, along with a respectable block confirmation time of less than two seconds. The framework also allows for the creation of globally available decentralized financial applications on a single foundational blockchain.

The Plasma framework gives Polygon the potential of housing an unlimited number of decentralized applications on their infrastructure without experiencing the normal drawbacks common on proof-of-work blockchains. So far, Polygon has attracted more than 50 DApps to its PoS-secured Ethereum sidechain.

PancakeSwap (CAKE)

PancakeSwap is an automated market maker (AMM) — a decentralized finance (DeFi) application that allows users to exchange tokens, providing liquidity via farming and earning fees in return.

It launched in September 2020 and is a decentralized exchange for swapping BEP20 tokens on Binance Smart Chain. PancakeSwap uses an automated market maker model where users trade against a liquidity pool. These pools are filled by users who deposit their funds into the pool and receive liquidity provider (LP) tokens in return.

These tokens can later be used to reclaim their share of the pool, as well as a portion of the trading fees. These LP tokens are known as FLIP. PancakeSwap also allows users to farm additional tokens such as CAKE and SYRUP. On the farm, users can deposit LP tokens and get rewarded with CAKE.

PancakeSwap allows users to trade BEP20 tokens, provide liquidity to the exchange and earn fees, stake LP tokens to earn CAKE, stake CAKE to earn more CAKE and stake CAKE to earn tokens of other projects.

CAKE is the governance token for PancakeSwap.
The supply of CAKE is not hard-capped. Theoretically, CAKE’s supply is unlimited. The team is looking into conducting regular token burns to make deflation higher than emission. For example, the team will burn 10% of the CAKE collected on lottery tickets and burn half of the fund raised through Initial Farm Offerings (IFO).

Certik (CTK)

Shentu Chain, a security-first, delegated proof-of-stake blockchain, for trustworthy execution of mission-critical applications, including DeFi, NFTs, and autonomous vehicles. Shentu Chain prioritizes cross-chain compatibility, built as a Cosmos Hub with full EVM and Hyperledger Burrow compatibility, as well as compatibility with eWASM and Ant Financial’s AntChain. Across protocols, blockchain projects can receive security insights with the Security Oracle, which provides real-time guards of on-chain transactions, identifying and flagging a wide range of malicious vulnerabilities before they occur. Depending on the level of the security score, audited blockchain projects of any protocol may be eligible for a ShentuShield membership, which is a flexible, decentralized reimbursement system for any crypto asset that is irretrievably lost or stolen due to security issues. ShentuShield memberships are open to all community members of these eligible blockchain projects, providing a safety net to holders of crypto assets in case anything unexpected happens.

Natively, projects can code in DeepSEA, a hyper-secure programming language supported by the Ethereum Foundation, Qtum Foundation, and IBM. DeepSEA works directly with the Shentu Virtual Machine (SVM), which is fully compatible with EVM. SVM innovatively exposes smart contract and blockchain security information, enabling unprecedented ways to access, check, and incorporate risk into the decisions of smart contracts. CTK is the native digital utility fuel of Shentu Chain, serving as the core utility for on-chain functionalities such as operating the Security Oracle and ShentuShield systems, paying gas consumption of Shentu Chain, and voting for governance decisions within the network.