Beyond Bitcoin: 9 Crypto Categories For New Investors | by Christian Jensen | Dec. 2021

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When you first start learning about cryptocurrencies, perhaps intrigued by news about disruptive blockchain technology or a friend’s story about turning $ 100 into $ 10,000, you quickly realize that ‘there is a lot more to it than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.

According to CoinMarketCap, we actually have almost 16,000 different cryptos to choose from!

This overwhelming number only begins to make sense when you realize that blockchain and crypto technology has much broader applications than the “digital currency” that may come to mind when you think of Bitcoin.

In this article, I’ll shed some light on your options as a new crypto investor. I won’t provide a complete list of all of the different categories of crypto, and I won’t go into detail on each one.

Instead, I’ll just walk you through some of the more interesting categories and mention a few specific examples within each. Hope this makes you curious enough to dig deeper into some of them and at least better understand what the space has to offer.

The usual warning

As of this writing, I am investing or considering investing in all of the cryptos I mention. Some of them are new and extremely risky bets. Others are well established and much more secure investments (in the crypto context).

That being said, the entire market is still highly speculative and volatile, and you should definitely do your own research before putting any money into any of the cryptos I mention. With the exception of this statement, nothing that I am saying is financial advice.

A note on “crypto-currencies” versus “tokens”

Just a clarification before going any further: technically, a “cryptocurrency” is the native currency of a blockchain, like Ethereum’s ETH or Bitcoin’s BTC. A crypto “token”, on the other hand, is the currency of a third-party project built on one of these existing blockchains. You will see that most of the examples in this article are of the token type.

The distinction is not that important to us as investors, however, and many people even use the terms interchangeably or refer to everything in the space as “cryptocurrencies”. But at least now you know why I use the two terms throughout this article and how they are different.

And now, with all of that out of the way, let’s start with one of the most relevant categories we can invest in: crypto exchanges.

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