Beyond Bitcoin lie thousands of "altcoins" - alternative cryptocurrencies promising everything from smart contracts to payments to pure speculation. This 2026 beginner guide explains what altcoins are, the main types, a practical framework for researching a project before you buy, and why the potential for high rewards comes with equally high risk.

A cryptocurrency fork is a new coin created on the basis of existing code or an algorithm with certain changes made to it. This is how altcoins based on Bitcoin and Litecoin came about.

"Feathers" is a colloquial name for the cryptocurrency Feathercoin, one of the early alternative coins (altcoins), based on the Scrypt hashing algorithm.

Peercoin (formerly PPCoin) is an altcoin that was one of the first to combine the Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Work mechanisms.

Namecoin is one of the first altcoins, created on the basis of Bitcoin's technology. Its purpose is the decentralized registration of names and domains, primarily in the censorship-resistant .bit zone.