bitcoin was released in 2009 by satoshi nakamoto, a pseudonym for which it is unclear who is behind it. bitcoin is a deflationary cryptocurrency, the number of bitcoins is limited to 21 million. transactions are recorded in the blockchain, a kind of transaction history, for everyone to see, after they have been checked and validated. the validation is done by miners, who provide computing power to the network and get paid for it. since the beginning of the year, btc has risen from 29000 usd to 45000 usd within two months.
the binance coin was created in 2017 and is based on the ethereum blockchain. it serves to strengthen the binance platform which is the second largest exchange in the world in terms of trading volume. it also acts as a means of payment for more than 150 cryptocurrencies on the platform. in september 2020 binance launched its binance smart chain, a blockchains for decentralized finance and dapp development. binance was founded by changpeng zhao (cz) and is backed by black hole kapital, vertex ventures and many other investors. there are currently 91% of 170.5 million bnb tokens in circulation. bnb coin burns take place quarterly until 100 billion bnb are finally destroyed, which corresponds to 50% of the total bnb ever spend. since the beginning of the year, the bnb token went from 37 USD to 329 USD.
cardano was founded in 2015 by ethereum co-founder charles hoskinson. it is backed by his company input output hong kong, the swiss cardano foundation and a japanese technology company named emurgo. cardanos long-term objective is that it will be able to provide fast, cheap and highly scalable transactions on a global basis. every new functions on cardano is checked and refined by experienced developers and researchers, therefore cardano is slowly developing in comparison to other crypto currencies. the cardano protocol is built from scratch and has similarities to ethereum but can for example host assets from other blockchains without smart contract deployment and unlike on ethereum multiple native assets can be send within the same transaction. the roadmap has five eras and the work for each era happens in parallel. cardano has a maximum supply of 45 billion ada and since the beginning of 2021 its price went from $0.18 to $1.4 within two month.
ethereum, founded in 2015, serves as a decentralized ecosystem for blockchain projects, a lot of them in the decentralized finance (defi) space. the ethereum blockchain lets you program decentralized applications (dapps), build smart contracts or organize initial coin offerings (icos) for crowd funding of projects. the ethereum virtual machine (evm) is the runtime environment for dapps. it protects the network against ddos attacks, prevents access to third-party smart contracts and is also a secure test environment for developers. solidity, an object-oriented programming language, is used for writing smart contracts. for the execution of the programmed code in the evm runtime environment, gas is used as payment. in terms of consensus mechanism ethereum is transitioning from proof-of-work (pow) to proof-of-stake (pos) as it is less resource intensive. eth does not have an overall cap and the total annual issuance of eth is fixed at 18 million, this means relative inflation decreases every year. co-founder and known face of ethereum is vitalik buterin. since the beginning of 2021 eth went from $724 to $2000 within two month.
launched in 2017 as ethlend, it was renamed in 2018 to aave. aave uses the ethereum network and is a defi lending protocol that enables users to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies choosing between stable and variable interest rates. aave is the only one to offer so called flash loans. these are loans granted for just a few seconds which have to be returned within one ethereum transaction otherwise the contract will be declared invalid. investors are among others three arrows capital and framework ventures. aave has a total supply of 16 million tokens. since the beginning of 2021 its price went from $81 to $559 within two month.
chainlink was founded in 2017 and launched its mainnet in 2019 on ethereum. chainlink uses chainlink oracles to fetch data from the real world for use in smart contracts. when pulling data from external sources oracle nodes have to bring it on-chain and aggregate it, which leads to a lot of eth gas costs. therefore chainlink plans to bring their data to a decentralized network, no longer performing on the ethereum blockchain. chainlink is used by platforms like synthetix and aave and is the number one defi coin by market cap. since the beginning of 2021 its price went from $13 to $30 within two month.
the graph is an indexing protocol for querying blockchain data and was founded in 2018. decentralized application (dapp) creators can request data by using graph's own language graphql. the graph is used by decentralized finance (defi) protocols like uniswap, synthetix or yearn.finance and backed by investors like coinbase ventures, dtc capital and framework ventures. by some it is considered the google of blockchain. grt is an erc-20 token, has a maximum supply of 10 billion coins with nearly 12% circulating supply and an inflation rate of 3% per year. since the beginning of 2021 its price went from $0.3 to $2 within two month.