8 Essential Cryptocurrencies to Invest in 2020
TechnologyBit News Today2 min read
The table lists eight large cryptocurrencies as they stood on 26 January 2020, with price and market capitalisation from CoinMarketCap data for that day and the protocol or business event linked to each coin. Bitcoin alone was worth about $156 billion, more than eight times Ethereum, and two coins faced block reward halvings in spring 2020.
| Coin | Ticker | Price and market cap, 26 Jan 2020 | What it is | Notable event |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | BTC | $8,596.83; $156.3 billion (rank 1) | The first proof-of-work cryptocurrency | Third halving at block 630,000 on 11 May 2020 cut the block reward from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC |
| Ethereum | ETH | $168.08; $18.4 billion (rank 2) | Smart-contract platform; ether pays for computation | Muir Glacier hard fork at block 9,200,000 on 2 Jan 2020 pushed the difficulty bomb back by about 4 million blocks |
| Bitcoin Cash | BCH | $347.00; $6.33 billion (rank 4) | August 2017 offshoot of Bitcoin with larger blocks | First halving at block 630,000 on 8 Apr 2020, reward cut from 12.5 to 6.25 BCH; hashrate fell sharply the same day |
| Litecoin | LTC | $56.21; $3.59 billion (rank 7) | Early Bitcoin derivative with faster blocks | Second halving on 5 Aug 2019 at block 1,680,000 reduced the reward from 25 to 12.5 LTC |
| EOS | EOS | $3.65; $3.47 billion (rank 8) | Smart-contract chain built by Block.one | Block.one settled with the SEC on 30 Sep 2019, paying a $24 million penalty over its roughly $4.1 billion token sale |
| Binance Coin | BNB | $17.44; $2.71 billion (rank 9) | Token of the Binance exchange and Binance Chain | Binance Chain mainnet went live on 18 Apr 2019; the ERC-20 to native BNB swap followed on 23 Apr |
| Monero | XMR | $63.87; $1.11 billion (rank 13) | Privacy-focused proof-of-work coin | RandomX hard fork on 30 Nov 2019 switched mining to a CPU-oriented algorithm aimed at ASICs and GPUs |
| Tezos | XTZ | $1.52; $1.06 billion (rank 15) | Proof-of-stake chain with on-chain governance | Coinbase opened Tezos staking rewards to eligible US customers in November 2019, estimating about 5% a year |
Sources: CoinMarketCap, CoinDesk, The Block, Decrypt, Cointelegraph, Coinbase.
