Altcoin
15/04/2026
An altcoin (short for alternative coin) is any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, all coins that came after it are considered its alternatives. Today there are thousands of altcoins, ranging from major networks like Ethereum and Litecoin to specialized coins built for privacy, smart contracts, or high-throughput transactions.
Why altcoins exist
Altcoins were created to address limitations of Bitcoin or to explore entirely new use cases:
- Litecoin (LTC) — faster block times (2.5 min vs 10 min) and lower transaction fees
- Monero (XMR) — private and untraceable transactions by default
- Kaspa (KAS) — high-throughput blockDAG architecture capable of 10+ blocks per second
- Alephium (ALPH) — sharded PoW blockchain with smart contract support
- Ergo (ERG) — advanced smart contracts with UTXO model, GPU-mineable
Altcoin mining
Many altcoins use Proof of Work (PoW) — the same fundamental consensus mechanism as Bitcoin, but with different algorithms. This has important implications:
- Some altcoins can be mined with GPUs or CPUs, not just ASICs
- Altcoin mining profitability changes with each coin's market price and network difficulty
- Switching between altcoins lets miners optimize earnings based on current conditions
Altcoins on Kryptex Pool
Kryptex Pool supports a wide range of mineable altcoins. You can mine them directly or use merged mining to earn multiple coins simultaneously with the same hashrate.
