[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"coin-guide:cosmos::en":3,"coin-guides-all::en":20},{"slug":4,"symbol":5,"name":6,"category":7,"risk_level":8,"summary":9,"reasons":10,"glossary_slug":14,"published_at":15,"title":6,"meta_title":16,"meta_description":17,"keywords":18},"cosmos","ATOM","Cosmos","Interoperability network","volatile","A framework and messaging standard for building independent blockchains that can pass tokens and messages to one another, rather than a single chain that hosts every application.",[11,12,13],"Chains built with the Cosmos SDK run their own validators and set their own rules, so a problem on one does not automatically become a problem on the others","The Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol moves assets between connected chains without a custodian holding them in the middle","ATOM secures and governs the Cosmos Hub specifically — it is not a claim on the other chains in the ecosystem, and holding it does not entitle you to their fees","interoperability","2026-08-09T03:50:01+00:00","Cosmos (ATOM) explained: a network of connected chains","Cosmos in plain English: a toolkit for building independent proof-of-stake chains that talk to each other over IBC. What ATOM secures, and what it does not.",[6,5,19,14],"IBC",[21,33,44,56,67,78,92,103,113,122,134,145,147,158,169,179,189,201,211,222,232,243,254,264,274,284,293,303,315,325,336,345,356,366,375,386,397,408,416],{"slug":22,"symbol":23,"name":24,"category":25,"risk_level":8,"summary":26,"reasons":27,"glossary_slug":31,"published_at":32},"aave","AAVE","Aave","DeFi governance token","A decentralised lending protocol where deposits sit in shared pools and borrowers take overcollateralised loans against assets they lock, with interest rates set by how much of a pool is in use.",[28,29,30],"Loans are overcollateralised and enforced by contract: if the value of your collateral falls far enough relative to what you borrowed, anyone may liquidate part of the position and take a bonus for doing it","Deposits are not insured — the risks are smart-contract failure, an oracle reporting a wrong price, and market moves too fast for liquidators to clear bad debt","AAVE is a governance token used to vote on protocol parameters and to backstop the system under its safety module; it is not a deposit account and not a claim on the pools","overcollateralization","2026-08-08T03:50:02+00:00",{"slug":34,"symbol":35,"name":36,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":38,"reasons":39,"glossary_slug":43,"published_at":32},"algorand","ALGO","Algorand","Smart-contract platform","A smart-contract network whose consensus draws a fresh random committee for every block and finalises it on the spot, so the chain never reorganises and confirmations are not a waiting game.",[40,41,42],"Block producers and voters are selected by a cryptographic lottery weighted by stake, and the selection is verifiable after the fact but not predictable in advance, which is what makes targeting a specific proposer difficult","Finality is immediate rather than probabilistic: once a block is agreed it is not revisited, so applications do not need a confirmation count before treating a payment as settled","ALGO pays transaction fees and is the stake that weights the lottery; participation does not require locking coins away from the account that holds them","deterministic-finality",{"slug":45,"symbol":46,"name":47,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":48,"reasons":49,"glossary_slug":54,"published_at":55},"aptos","APT","Aptos","A proof-of-stake layer-1 launched in October 2022 by engineers from Meta's abandoned Diem project, built around the Move programming language and an execution engine that processes independent transactions in parallel rather than one after another.",[50,51,52,53],"Move is the distinguishing feature rather than the marketing: assets are represented as typed resources that the language itself forbids from being copied or silently discarded, which removes at the language level a category of bug that Solidity contracts have to be audited for","The pitch is parallel execution — transactions that do not touch the same state are processed simultaneously — so throughput claims should be read as a ceiling under favourable conditions rather than a rate you will observe on a busy day","The chain launched with a large share of the supply allocated to the core team, early investors and the foundation, released on a multi-year unlock schedule, so circulating supply has risen on a published timetable independently of demand","It competes directly with several other well-funded Move and parallel-execution chains for the same developers, and an ecosystem's depth — not its benchmark numbers — is what determines whether a chain retains them","smart-contract","2026-08-18T03:30:02+00:00",{"slug":57,"symbol":58,"name":59,"category":60,"risk_level":8,"summary":61,"reasons":62,"glossary_slug":66,"published_at":32},"arbitrum","ARB","Arbitrum","Scaling network","An optimistic rollup that executes transactions off the Ethereum main chain and posts the results back to it, so users pay Ethereum-level security costs only once per batch.",[63,64,65],"Transactions are ordered by a sequencer and settled on Ethereum, so fees are far lower than transacting on Ethereum directly while the final record still lives there","Withdrawals back to Ethereum pass through a challenge window measured in days, during which a fraud proof can dispute the posted result — bridges that offer instant exits are third parties taking that risk for a fee","ARB is a governance token for the protocol's DAO; it is not the network's gas token and does not confer a share of sequencer revenue","optimistic-rollup",{"slug":68,"symbol":69,"name":70,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":71,"reasons":72,"glossary_slug":76,"published_at":77},"avalanche","AVAX","Avalanche","A proof-of-stake smart-contract platform designed around fast transaction finality and the ability for projects to run their own separate, application-specific chains.",[73,74,75],"Transactions reach final settlement in seconds rather than minutes","Projects can launch their own chains with custom rules instead of sharing one congested network","The developer and application ecosystem is meaningfully smaller than Ethereum's, which affects both available liquidity and the maturity of the tooling","proof-of-stake","2026-08-05T03:50:01+00:00",{"slug":79,"symbol":80,"name":81,"category":82,"risk_level":83,"summary":84,"reasons":85,"glossary_slug":90,"published_at":91},"bitcoin","BTC","Bitcoin","Store of value","established","The original cryptocurrency and still the largest by market value, with over fifteen years of continuous operation and no successful attack on its core network.",[86,87,88,89],"Longest track record of any crypto asset by a wide margin","Most decentralized and battle-tested validator (miner) set","Still far more volatile than traditional stores of value like gold or bonds","Supply is capped at 21 million coins — the scarcity argument rests on that cap, not on any yield the asset pays",null,"2026-07-19T01:00:17+00:00",{"slug":93,"symbol":94,"name":95,"category":96,"risk_level":8,"summary":97,"reasons":98,"glossary_slug":102,"published_at":15},"bitcoin-cash","BCH","Bitcoin Cash","Payments","A network created by a 2017 hard fork of Bitcoin, taking the opposite side of a long argument about whether to scale by enlarging blocks or by moving activity to other layers.",[99,100,101],"Larger blocks fit more transactions per block, which keeps on-chain fees low while activity is modest; the cost is a heavier chain to store and relay, which raises the bar for running a full node over time","The fork was contentious rather than technical housekeeping: everyone holding at the fork block held on both chains afterwards, and the two have followed separate development paths since","BCH pays fees and is the unit of account on its own chain; it is a distinct asset from BTC despite the shared history and the similar proof-of-work design","hard-fork",{"slug":104,"symbol":105,"name":105,"category":106,"risk_level":8,"summary":107,"reasons":108,"glossary_slug":112,"published_at":77},"bnb","BNB","Exchange token","The token issued by Binance: it discounts trading fees on the exchange and pays transaction costs on BNB Chain, so its usefulness is tied to one company.",[109,110,111],"Its main uses — fee discounts and BNB Chain gas — both depend on Binance's own products","Regulatory action against the issuing exchange is a direct risk to the token, not a separate one","Supply is reduced by scheduled burns run by the issuer rather than by a fixed protocol rule","tokenomics",{"slug":114,"symbol":115,"name":116,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":117,"reasons":118,"glossary_slug":76,"published_at":77},"cardano","ADA","Cardano","A proof-of-stake smart-contract platform whose development is driven by peer-reviewed academic research, which makes it deliberate and slow-moving by design rather than by accident.",[119,120,121],"Ran proof-of-stake from launch, years before Ethereum switched to it","Smart contracts only arrived in 2021, well after the network itself launched","The research-first process trades shipping speed for formal review — judge it on delivered features, not roadmaps",{"slug":123,"symbol":124,"name":125,"category":126,"risk_level":8,"summary":127,"reasons":128,"glossary_slug":133,"published_at":55},"celestia","TIA","Celestia","Data availability network","A network launched in October 2023 that does one job on purpose: it accepts data from other chains, orders it and guarantees it was actually published, leaving execution and settlement to whoever builds on top.",[129,130,131,132],"It is the clearest working example of the modular thesis — that ordering data, executing transactions and settling results need not happen on the same chain — so understanding Celestia is largely understanding whether that separation is worth its extra moving parts","Light clients use data availability sampling, downloading small random pieces of each block to gain statistical confidence that the whole block was published, which is what lets ordinary hardware verify publication without storing everything","TIA's demand is unusually legible: it is paid for blockspace by the rollups that post data there, so the asset's usage tracks the number and activity of chains that chose this network rather than an application economy of its own","That same clarity is the risk. Data availability is a competitive market with well-funded alternatives including Ethereum's own blob capacity, and a rollup can migrate its data layer far more easily than users can migrate a chain","data-availability",{"slug":135,"symbol":136,"name":137,"category":138,"risk_level":8,"summary":139,"reasons":140,"glossary_slug":144,"published_at":77},"chainlink","LINK","Chainlink","Oracle network","A network of independent operators that delivers outside information — most often prices — into smart contracts, which cannot fetch data on their own.",[141,142,143],"Smart contracts have no way to read the outside world, so an oracle is infrastructure, not decoration","LINK is what pays the node operators who supply and secure that data","It is a service layer rather than a blockchain, so its usage rises and falls with the DeFi apps built on top","oracle",{"slug":4,"symbol":5,"name":6,"category":7,"risk_level":8,"summary":9,"reasons":146,"glossary_slug":14,"published_at":15},[11,12,13],{"slug":148,"symbol":149,"name":150,"category":25,"risk_level":8,"summary":151,"reasons":152,"glossary_slug":157,"published_at":55},"curve-dao","CRV","Curve DAO","A decentralised exchange launched in 2020 and specialised in swapping assets that are supposed to trade at the same value — stablecoins, staked and unstaked versions of the same coin — plus a governance token whose influence is bought with time rather than size alone.",[153,154,155,156],"Its pricing curve is the point: an exchange designed for assets expected to stay near parity can concentrate liquidity around that parity and quote far tighter prices than a general-purpose pool, which is why stablecoin swaps and staked-asset pairs congregated there","CRV introduced vote-escrow to DeFi — lock the token for a period up to several years and receive voting power and boosted rewards in proportion to the time committed — a design widely copied because it prices governance influence in patience instead of purely in capital","Because those votes direct where token emissions flow, other protocols bid for them, creating a secondary market in Curve governance that is a case study in how one protocol's incentives become another's operating cost","The history is instructive on risk rather than reassuring: a July 2023 reentrancy exploit hit pools built with specific affected compiler versions, and later that year the founder's large CRV-backed borrowings became a market-wide stress event in their own right","vote-escrow-tokenomics",{"slug":159,"symbol":160,"name":161,"category":162,"risk_level":163,"summary":164,"reasons":165,"glossary_slug":90,"published_at":91},"dogecoin","DOGE","Dogecoin","Meme coin","speculative","Started in 2013 as a joke based on an internet meme, with no roadmap or scarcity mechanism comparable to Bitcoin's — its price is driven almost entirely by sentiment.",[166,167,168],"Unlimited supply — there is no maximum cap, unlike Bitcoin's fixed 21 million","Price history is dominated by social-media-driven spikes and crashes","Treat it as pure speculation on attention and sentiment, not an investment thesis",{"slug":170,"symbol":171,"name":172,"category":37,"risk_level":83,"summary":173,"reasons":174,"glossary_slug":178,"published_at":91},"ethereum","ETH","Ethereum","The leading platform for smart contracts and decentralized apps — most of DeFi, NFTs and stablecoin activity runs on it or a network derived from it.",[175,176,177],"Large, active developer ecosystem and the deepest liquidity outside Bitcoin","Moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, cutting its energy use by well over 99%","Network fees can spike sharply during congestion, and smart-contract bugs are a real risk for anything built on top","defi",{"slug":180,"symbol":181,"name":182,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":183,"reasons":184,"glossary_slug":188,"published_at":15},"ethereum-classic","ETC","Ethereum Classic","The continuation of the original Ethereum ledger by participants who rejected the 2016 hard fork that reversed The DAO theft, on the principle that a ledger should not be rewritten.",[185,186,187],"Both chains share every block before the split, so the difference is not the technology but a decision about whether an exceptional intervention was legitimate","Ethereum Classic kept proof of work when Ethereum moved to proof of stake, and a smaller share of mining power makes a chain cheaper to attack — this network has suffered documented deep reorganisations","ETC pays gas on its own chain and is a separate asset from ETH; the two have not shared an upgrade path since 2016","chain-split",{"slug":190,"symbol":191,"name":192,"category":193,"risk_level":8,"summary":194,"reasons":195,"glossary_slug":199,"published_at":200},"filecoin","FIL","Filecoin","Storage network","A network that turns file storage into an open market: clients pay providers to hold data, and providers must keep proving to the chain that the data is still there.",[196,197,198],"A storage deal is enforced by two cryptographic proofs — one that the provider encoded the client's specific data, and one submitted repeatedly over time that they still hold it — with staked collateral slashed for failing them","The chain stores the deals and the proofs, not the files, so retrieval speed and availability depend on the provider you contracted with rather than on the protocol","FIL pays for deals and gas and is the collateral providers must lock to take on storage; the price of a deal is negotiated in the market rather than set by the protocol","proof-of-space","2026-08-10T03:50:01+00:00",{"slug":202,"symbol":203,"name":204,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":205,"reasons":206,"glossary_slug":210,"published_at":200},"hedera","HBAR","Hedera","A public ledger that records transactions in a gossip-based graph rather than a chain of blocks, and whose consensus nodes are run by a defined council of named organisations.",[207,208,209],"Consensus comes from nodes gossiping about what they heard and when, from which each node can compute the same ordering without a leader — a different construction from a chain of blocks, with fast finality as the design goal","Governance is explicitly not open: a council of named organisations operates the consensus nodes and votes on protocol and pricing, which is a trade of permissionless participation for accountable, identified operators","HBAR pays transaction and service fees and is the asset staked to nodes; the network exposes fixed-fee services such as consensus timestamping and token issuance alongside EVM-compatible contracts","directed-acyclic-graph",{"slug":212,"symbol":213,"name":214,"category":215,"risk_level":8,"summary":216,"reasons":217,"glossary_slug":221,"published_at":200},"lido-dao","LDO","Lido DAO","Liquid staking","A protocol that pools deposited ether, stakes it through a curated set of node operators, and issues a transferable token that represents the staked position.",[218,219,220],"Staking directly means running or trusting a validator and accepting that the stake is not liquid; the protocol's answer is a receipt token that can be moved and used elsewhere while the underlying stake stays with the validators","The risks are stacked: the smart contracts, the operator set chosen by governance, validator penalties, and the possibility that the receipt token trades away from the value of what it represents","LDO is a governance token, not the staked asset — it votes on the operator set and protocol parameters and does not itself carry a claim on staked ether","liquid-staking",{"slug":223,"symbol":224,"name":225,"category":96,"risk_level":8,"summary":226,"reasons":227,"glossary_slug":231,"published_at":77},"litecoin","LTC","Litecoin","One of the oldest surviving cryptocurrencies, launched in 2011 from Bitcoin's codebase with faster blocks and a larger maximum supply.",[228,229,230],"Running with few protocol changes since 2011 gives it an unusually long, uneventful uptime record","Blocks arrive roughly every 2.5 minutes against Bitcoin's ten, and the supply cap is 84 million rather than 21 million","It has far less developer activity and narrower merchant use than its age might suggest","proof-of-work",{"slug":233,"symbol":234,"name":235,"category":236,"risk_level":8,"summary":237,"reasons":238,"glossary_slug":242,"published_at":77},"monero","XMR","Monero","Privacy","A network that conceals sender, receiver and amount by default, unlike Bitcoin, where every transaction is permanently public and traceable.",[239,240,241],"Privacy is the default rather than an option a user has to switch on","Many regulated exchanges have delisted it, so buying and selling can be harder and less liquid","The same properties that protect ordinary users also attract regulatory scrutiny in most major markets","privacy-coin",{"slug":244,"symbol":245,"name":246,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":247,"reasons":248,"glossary_slug":252,"published_at":253},"near-protocol","NEAR","NEAR Protocol","A proof-of-stake smart-contract platform that splits its workload across shards and uses readable account names instead of raw hexadecimal addresses.",[249,250,251],"Accounts can be human-readable names rather than long hex strings, which removes some of the copy-paste risk but introduces the familiar problem of lookalike names","An account can hold several access keys with different permissions, so a key limited to one contract can be used day to day while a full-access key stays offline","NEAR pays transaction fees and is staked to validators; delegating it carries slashing and lock-up conditions set by the protocol, not by whoever markets the yield","sharding","2026-08-11T03:50:01+00:00",{"slug":255,"symbol":256,"name":257,"category":60,"risk_level":8,"summary":258,"reasons":259,"glossary_slug":263,"published_at":253},"optimism","OP","Optimism","An optimistic rollup that executes transactions off Ethereum and settles them there, built on an openly published stack that other networks also run.",[260,261,262],"Fees are paid in ether on the rollup rather than in OP, and the transactions still settle to Ethereum, which is where the final record lives","Withdrawing directly to Ethereum passes through a challenge period measured in days; anything faster is a third-party bridge or liquidity provider taking that risk for a fee","OP is a governance token in the Optimism Collective, including funding decisions for shared infrastructure — it is not a share of any chain's fee income","rollup",{"slug":265,"symbol":266,"name":267,"category":7,"risk_level":8,"summary":268,"reasons":269,"glossary_slug":273,"published_at":77},"polkadot","DOT","Polkadot","A network where separate specialised chains connect to a central relay chain and borrow its security instead of each having to recruit validators alone.",[270,271,272],"A new chain inherits the shared validator set rather than bootstrapping its own security from zero","The way connected chains get and keep their slot has been redesigned more than once, so check current rules","Building on it requires a specific technical stack, which narrows the pool of developers compared with Ethereum tooling","validator",{"slug":275,"symbol":276,"name":277,"category":60,"risk_level":8,"summary":278,"reasons":279,"glossary_slug":283,"published_at":77},"polygon","POL","Polygon","A scaling network that processes transactions cheaply alongside Ethereum, aimed at applications for which Ethereum's own fees are prohibitive.",[280,281,282],"Transaction costs are a small fraction of Ethereum's, which makes small everyday transfers practical","Its main chain runs its own validator set, so it does not inherit Ethereum's security wholesale","The network token was renamed and migrated from MATIC to POL, so older guides and tickers can mislead","layer-2",{"slug":285,"symbol":286,"name":287,"category":162,"risk_level":163,"summary":288,"reasons":289,"glossary_slug":90,"published_at":77},"shiba-inu","SHIB","Shiba Inu","A meme token launched on Ethereum in 2020 with an extremely large supply, whose price is driven by social attention rather than by any underlying revenue.",[290,291,292],"It is an ordinary Ethereum token, not its own blockchain, and was created without any funding round or product","The supply is enormous, so a very low unit price says nothing about how cheap it is","Treat it as a bet on continued attention — there is no cash flow or protocol fee underneath it",{"slug":294,"symbol":295,"name":296,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":297,"reasons":298,"glossary_slug":90,"published_at":91},"solana","SOL","Solana","A high-throughput blockchain built for speed and low transaction fees, popular for trading apps and consumer-facing crypto products.",[299,300,301,302],"Has suffered multiple network outages over its history, some lasting hours","Price has historically swung more sharply than Bitcoin or Ethereum across market cycles","Faster and growing, but with a more concentrated validator set than Ethereum today","Everything runs on one chain rather than on rollups above it, so an outage stops the whole network at once rather than a single layer",{"slug":304,"symbol":305,"name":306,"category":307,"risk_level":308,"summary":309,"reasons":310,"glossary_slug":314,"published_at":91},"stablecoins","USDT\u002FUSDC","Stablecoins","Stablecoin","issuer-risk","Tokens designed to track the value of a fiat currency, usually the US dollar — useful for moving value without crypto's usual price swings, but you're trusting the issuer's reserves.",[311,312,313],"Value is only as solid as the issuer's reserve backing and how often it's audited","Major issuers publish reserve attestations at different frequencies and levels of detail — read them before relying on one","A stable price is not the same as a risk-free asset; issuer or regulatory problems can still break the peg","stablecoin",{"slug":316,"symbol":317,"name":318,"category":96,"risk_level":8,"summary":319,"reasons":320,"glossary_slug":324,"published_at":253},"stellar","XLM","Stellar","A payment-focused ledger designed to move value between currencies, where assets other than its native token are issued by named organisations that promise redemption.",[321,322,323],"Holding an issued asset on Stellar means opening a trustline to that issuer, so the credit risk is the issuer's — the ledger records the balance but does not guarantee the redemption behind it","Consensus comes from a federated agreement between chosen validator sets rather than mining, so transactions settle in seconds and fees are a small fixed amount rather than an auction","XLM pays those fees, meets the minimum balance every account must hold, and is the bridge asset for path payments; it is not a claim on any issuer's reserves","crypto-remittance",{"slug":326,"symbol":327,"name":328,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":329,"reasons":330,"glossary_slug":334,"published_at":335},"sui","SUI","Sui","A smart-contract network that models state as individually owned objects rather than one global account table, which lets transactions that touch nothing in common be processed at the same time.",[331,332,333],"A transfer involving only objects one address owns does not need the network to agree on an ordering against everyone else's transactions, so it can take a faster settlement path than one touching shared state","Contracts are written in Move, a language designed so that assets are types the compiler tracks — a resource cannot be silently copied or dropped, which removes a family of bugs at the language level rather than the audit level","SUI pays gas and is staked to validators; storage is paid for up front with a portion refunded when data is deleted, so the cost model differs from chains that charge only per transaction","transactions-per-second","2026-08-12T03:50:01+00:00",{"slug":337,"symbol":338,"name":339,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":340,"reasons":341,"glossary_slug":76,"published_at":335},"tezos","XTZ","Tezos","A smart-contract network built so that changes to its own protocol are proposed, voted on and installed by the chain itself, rather than agreed off-chain and shipped as a fork.",[342,343,344],"Amendments run through fixed on-chain periods — proposal, exploration, testing, promotion — so an upgrade either passes the vote or does not happen, and the chain does not split into two versions","Consensus is proof-of-stake: holders may run a validator or delegate their stake to one without transferring ownership of the coins, and validators face penalties for signing conflicting blocks","XTZ pays transaction fees, is the asset that is staked or delegated, and is the unit that voting weight is measured in — governance rights come from stake rather than from a separate token",{"slug":346,"symbol":347,"name":348,"category":349,"risk_level":8,"summary":350,"reasons":351,"glossary_slug":355,"published_at":335},"the-graph","GRT","The Graph","Indexing network","A network that indexes blockchain data into queryable APIs called subgraphs, so applications can ask structured questions instead of scanning every block themselves.",[352,353,354],"Reading raw chain data is slow and awkward, so indexers run the software that transforms it into a queryable form and are paid query fees for serving results","Accuracy is backed by stake: indexers lock tokens that can be slashed if they are shown to have served incorrect data, and curators and delegators signal which subgraphs and indexers deserve traffic","GRT is the staking asset and the unit query fees are paid in; the network serves data about other chains and does not settle transactions of its own","on-chain-data",{"slug":357,"symbol":358,"name":359,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":360,"reasons":361,"glossary_slug":252,"published_at":365},"toncoin","TON","Toncoin","A smart-contract network whose design splits work across many shards, with contracts communicating by asynchronous messages rather than direct calls within one global state.",[362,363,364],"Shards can split and merge with load, which is the network's answer to congestion, and it means throughput is a property of how work distributes rather than of one shared queue","Contracts talk by sending messages that arrive later, so developers cannot assume a call and its result happen in the same instant — a real difference from EVM-style programming that changes how applications are written","TON pays fees, is staked by validators, and is used for the network's naming and storage services; the project originated at Telegram, was abandoned by the company after a US regulatory action, and has since been continued by an independent community","2026-08-13T03:50:01+00:00",{"slug":367,"symbol":368,"name":369,"category":37,"risk_level":8,"summary":370,"reasons":371,"glossary_slug":314,"published_at":77},"tron","TRX","TRON","A smart-contract network known mainly for cheap, fast stablecoin transfers, secured by a small elected set of validators rather than an open one.",[372,373,374],"Carries a very large share of global USDT transfer volume because fees are low","Block production sits with a small elected validator set, so control is far more concentrated than on Bitcoin or Ethereum","Closely associated with founder Justin Sun, whose ventures have drawn repeated regulatory attention",{"slug":376,"symbol":377,"name":378,"category":25,"risk_level":8,"summary":379,"reasons":380,"glossary_slug":384,"published_at":385},"uniswap","UNI","Uniswap","The governance token of one of the largest decentralised exchanges, where trades are executed by smart contracts rather than by a company's order book.",[381,382,383],"The protocol runs on-chain, so you trade from your own wallet without depositing with a custodian","UNI grants votes on protocol decisions, not an automatic share of the fees traders pay","Trading on it exposes you to smart-contract risk and to whatever token you choose to swap into","governance-token","2026-08-06T03:50:02+00:00",{"slug":387,"symbol":388,"name":389,"category":390,"risk_level":8,"summary":391,"reasons":392,"glossary_slug":396,"published_at":365},"vechain","VET","VeChain","Supply-chain network","A chain aimed at enterprise record-keeping — product provenance, logistics, certification — built on a two-token model that separates the asset held from the asset spent on fees.",[393,394,395],"Holding VET generates a second token over time, and that second token is what pays for transactions, so an application's running cost is decoupled from the market price of the asset its operator holds","The consensus is an authority model: a limited set of known, vetted masternodes produces blocks, which suits organisations that want an identifiable operator set and is a deliberate step away from open participation","The chain records claims that originate off it — a scan, a sensor reading, a certificate — so its guarantee is that a record was not altered afterwards, not that the record was true when written","gas-fee",{"slug":398,"symbol":399,"name":400,"category":401,"risk_level":308,"summary":402,"reasons":403,"glossary_slug":407,"published_at":385},"wrapped-bitcoin","WBTC","Wrapped Bitcoin","Wrapped asset","An Ethereum token meant to be backed one-for-one by bitcoin held in custody, so bitcoin can be used inside Ethereum applications.",[404,405,406],"It lets bitcoin act as collateral in Ethereum DeFi, which the Bitcoin network itself cannot do","You hold a claim on a custodian's reserves, not bitcoin — the custodian is the single point of failure","The custody arrangements behind it have changed since launch, so confirm who holds the backing today","wrapped-token",{"slug":409,"symbol":410,"name":410,"category":96,"risk_level":8,"summary":411,"reasons":412,"glossary_slug":90,"published_at":91},"xrp","XRP","Designed for fast, low-cost cross-border settlement, and closely tied to Ripple, the company most associated with promoting it.",[413,414,415],"Years of US regulatory uncertainty preceded a 2023 court ruling that clarified some — not all — aspects of its legal status","Price and trading volume are heavily influenced by the issuing company's own actions and announcements","Real-world payment adoption claims are easy to overstate — read past the headlines",{"slug":417,"symbol":418,"name":419,"category":236,"risk_level":8,"summary":420,"reasons":421,"glossary_slug":425,"published_at":365},"zcash","ZEC","Zcash","A payments chain that offers two kinds of address — transparent, which behaves like Bitcoin, and shielded, where a zero-knowledge proof validates a transfer without revealing sender, receiver or amount.",[422,423,424],"A shielded transaction proves to the network that it is valid and balanced without publishing what it contains, which is a different approach from mixing transactions together to obscure them","Privacy is opt-in, so the size of the shielded pool matters: value moved between a transparent and a shielded address leaves a visible edge, and a mostly-transparent chain gives shielded users a smaller crowd to blend into","ZEC pays fees and is the transferred asset; the same coin can sit in either kind of address, and the choice of address is what determines what the chain reveals","zero-knowledge-proof"]