Motto: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

– Maya Angelou

On the opposed side of the equation, not very unlike the stablecoins, are the payment coins. (Check my article about stablecoins here).

The payment coins are cryptocurrencies  designed as means of payment. Bitcoin is open source , free to use , decentralised. There are other coins (LTC for payment, ETH for smart contract, COMP for DEFI and so on). After one decade, the market is still young, but many new good projects emerged lately. So, if it is to answer to the question: Are the payment coins money? The answer is the similar with the stablecoins issue, on the same basis. No, they are not yet. 

I will derail a bit, talking about blockchain forks. As we know, the blockchains are the representations of the state of the network wieved as a function of time. A fork is happening when a blockchain is hard forked, with two networks continuing separately from a specific point in time (think about the hard fork happened in 2017 between BTC and BCH). The mentioned BTC and BCH are aiming primarily to facilitate payments and function as store of value, but now there are a low of new coins on the market doing the exact same thing, many of them just having slightly different traits and properties, but addresing to different issues on the market. Many project teams choose on what to focus, solving issues like real-world usage (ETN as phone top=up), decentralisation, even distribution (not only few big whales having control of the price), or zero/minimal fees. 

Dash - made in 2014, was quite innovative at the time, enabling fully private transactions (with sender, receiver and amount shielded), and was quickly followed by Monero (2015) and ZCASH (2016). Another big step was the creation of the Masternode concept, used by clients locking up 1000 DASH and receiving passive income after they approve transactions. This is what we now call staking. 

XRP (incorrectly called Ripple) was founded in 2012 by Jed McCaleb and Chris Larsen, using Ripple protocol, based on a blockchain ledger, aiming to transfer money faster between banks and institutions. All the tokens were created in the beginning, and Ripple is the company, owning 57% of all the XRP tokens (not in circulation). XRP is subject of controversy, being fully centralised, and many do not consider XRP being a real cryptocurrency. 

XLM (Stellar Lumens) were also launched in 2014 by Jeb McCaled (after he distanced from Ripple). Fun fact, he also founded MtGox, the exchange famous for one of the most controversial hack ever, when they lost more than half billion BTC from both cold and hot wallets. So, back to XLM, this token was focused on cross border payments and remittances, with very low (almos inexistent) fees, and uses its own mechanism - Stellar consensus protocol. The coins are already minted, and some said even that all those are too centralised. It can deploy apps and tokens on top of the protocol, and there are few stablecoins build on top of the Stellar network. 

This was the introduction of the first payment coins. Take care and see you soon!

G.

My crypto-related links  (check ratings - 1 to 5 stars based on my personal experience)

Games to gain crypto

***** League of Kingdoms - link here: similar with Heroes of Might and Magic (worldwide - paying in DAI)

Exchanges

***** Binance( good for staking/savings ) - link here

***** Kucoin( good for staking/savings ) - link here

***** Coinbase( ideal for beginners )- link here  

Investments

**** BlockFi (decent interest rates, but less choices than Celsius) - link here

***** Celsius.network (good rates of interests and monthly codes for free crypto, 1235256530 => my referral for $10 bonus  ) - link here

**** Coinbundle (investing in crypto bundles) - link here  

**** Stakecube (staking, masternodes and very easy to claim faucets for 28 coins/tokens) - link here

Wallets for multiple cryptocurrencies

***** Coinpot - link here (microwallet for all Moon faucets, Bitfun and Bonusbitcoin)

***** Atomic wallet - link here (microwallet for Publish0x DAI, BAT and Loopring)

***** Spherewallet (for Horizen, combined with the faucet for extra bonus) - link here  

**** Crypto.com wallet (good interest staking and 50$ bonus in MCO) - link here

Free crypto (faucets and more)

****Lbry.tv (free crypto for watching or making videos) - link here

**** Bitfun( 3 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here

*** Bonusbitcoin( 15 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here

**** Moon Bitcoin ( 5 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here

***** Horizen faucet ( 20 hours countdown - automatically deposit to Sphere wallet ) - link here

*** Tezosfaucet ( 7 days countdown - automatically deposit to Coinbase or Binance wallet ) - link here

** Tron and other crypto faucet (24 hours countdown) - link here  

Others

***** Publish0x blog (Free BAT, DAI and Loopring for reading/writing - can combine with Atomic wallet) - link here

***** Brave browser (Free BAT for using it, based on paid ads, very good AdBlocker and high speed) - link here    

Disclaimer: This text also can be re-published on my personal blogs, such as this one.