The name is simply a contraction of alternative coin, from a time when Bitcoin was the only thing on the menu and everything else was defined by not being it. That framing has aged oddly, because the category now holds projects with wildly different designs, governance and levels of seriousness. Treating them as a single asset class is the first mistake most beginners make.
It helps to sort altcoins by what they actually are. Some are the native coin of their own network, the unit that pays fees and secures the chain. Others are <a href="/glossary/token/">tokens</a> issued on top of an existing chain using a shared standard, which is far cheaper to do and is exactly why there are so many of them. The security assumptions behind those two are not the same.
Thin markets are the practical hazard. A coin with few buyers can look healthy on a chart and still be hard to sell without moving the price against you, and a shallow order book makes manipulation easier. The further down the size rankings you go, the more common outright fraud becomes, so our guide to <a href="/toolkit/how-to-spot-crypto-scams/">spotting crypto scams</a> is worth reading before the shopping starts.
None of this makes altcoins uniformly bad, and plenty of them solve real problems. It does mean the burden of homework is heavier than for the largest, most scrutinised networks. Read the project's own documentation, find out who can mint or freeze the supply, and look at how a coin behaves across several venues on our <a href="/markets/">markets page</a> rather than in a single screenshot.
How to Evaluate a Crypto Project
Key takeaways
- Altcoin is a category of exclusion rather than a quality rating, and tells you only that the coin is not bitcoin.
- Distinguish a chain's native coin from a token issued on somebody else's chain, because the risks differ.
- Small size usually means thin markets, so the cost of exiting matters as much as the entry price.
Altcoin — frequently asked questions
Is Ether an altcoin?
It depends who you ask. By the strict definition, anything that is not bitcoin qualifies, so yes. In practice many writers treat Ether as its own category because the network it secures is large and heavily used, and reserve altcoin for everything below the top tier. The label is informal, so check what a given article means by it rather than assuming.
How many altcoins are there?
Nobody can give an honest exact number, because creating a token on an existing chain takes minutes and costs very little. Listing sites track thousands, but that counts only the ones somebody bothered to submit, and many are abandoned, duplicated or dormant. The useful question is not how many exist but how many have real users, real liquidity and code that anyone has audited.
New to crypto, or filling in the gaps? Work through the essentials in Learn, browse every term A–Z, or see live prices for the coins these concepts power.