Bitcoin remains king of crypto despite 436 forks

Bitcoin remains the king of crypto despite 436 new coins sprung from its code

Data on crypto market aggregator CoinMarketCap shows that there are over 7,000 cryptocurrencies in the $325 billion crypto market. Of these projects, more than 400 have a link to the pioneer cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

According to Map of Coins, which provides a visualized history of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, there have been 436 altcoins with a direct link to the world’s pioneer digital asset. Of these coins, 250 have since “died” or gone defunct with Bitcoin remaining the largest in terms of the developer community as well as control over 58% of the market share since.

Namecoin and Litecoin among earliest Bitcoin forks

Namecoin emerged in 2011, a project that looked to build a blockchain-based platform for decentralized and censorship-resistant identity. It’s after this very first success story that the altcoin frenzy literally picked, and in a decade saw the spawning of hundreds of forks.

Litecoin (LTC) was created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee. And which was itself a fork of the code of another early Bitcoin fork called Tenebrix. Today Litecoin ranks among the top ten cryptocurrencies, largely referred to as the “silver” to Bitcoin’s “gold” standard.

In the years that followed, hundreds of forks were created. However, the most threatening to Bitcoin was the acrimony that ensued from proposals to adopt SegWit in 2017. The disagreement led to the first hard fork that split the Bitcoin blockchain to create Bitcoin Cash.

Currently, BCH is one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap and regularly features among the top five despite a rise in popularity for projects like Polkadot and ChainLink.

Bitcoin (BTC) forked 46 times since 2017

After Bitcoin Cash, the days and months that followed the contentious saw 46 new Bitcoin offshoots. It appeared the bull market that saw BTC/USD hit all-time highs around $20k motivated a whole host of individuals, some that seemed to have been motivated by a desire for quick cash in copying and modifying Satoshi Nakamoto’s original code.

As such, most of the coins created then have gone defunct or command minuscule trading volumes. But if you check the crypto market, you won’t fail to spot trades related to several coins with the term “bitcoin” as part of the name.

Some of the forked coins include Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Candy, Bitcoin God, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Pizza and Quantum Bitcoin among others.

One of the newest is Bitcoin SV (BSV), which came about as a result of a very acrimonious hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain in 2018.