The rise of open-source cryptocurrency has marked a significant shift in the digital currency landscape. It offers a transparent and collaborative approach to financial technology.
We will examine how their decentralized nature and public source code are affecting the future of digital transactions. Understanding open-source cryptocurrencies is crucial for anyone interested in the evolving dynamics of digital finance.
Let’s dive in!
What Is Open-Source Crypto?
Most software we are familiar with is developed and owned by a single company. Take Microsoft Windows, for example. It’s built and maintained by Microsoft, and Microsoft owns the code that Windows runs on and the intellectual property around that code. Microsoft also reaps all the profits from selling Windows to PC users.
Open-source software, on the other hand, isn’t owned by any one company or developer. Instead, it’s created and then released for anyone to use. Open-source code is available for anyone to view, and developers can copy and modify it to build on it.
Most cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, are open-source software. Collaborative groups of developers created these cryptocurrencies, but those developers don’t own or control the cryptocurrencies. Instead, the code is available for anyone to see.
Many developers have created modified copies of the open-source code for Bitcoin. That’s where Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, and BitcoinSV come from.
Some of the most popular projects on the market are open-source. Here’s the ultimate open-source cryptocurrency list:Which Crypto Is Open-Source?
Best Open-Source Cryptocurrencies Reviewed
Want to know more about open-source cryptocurrencies? We’ll take a closer look at some of the best open-source blockchain projects for 2024, including new crypto projects:
1. Bitcoin (BTC)
Bitcoin open–source token is the most profitable cryptocurrency in the world. It is the first decentralized digital currency, launched in 2009, and has several advantages.
One of them is that BTCs are transferred directly from person to person without the need for a bank, which also means the fees are much lower. You can use them in every country and buy anything with Bitcoin.
This is the only crypto officially recognized by many governments, including the US. It has even surpassed Mastercard in daily transaction volume.
Its design is public; nobody controls Bitcoin, but everyone can take part. Bitcoin uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Its price has changed over time, and the current price is $64,215. Its market cap is $1.33 trillion.
At first, miners were awarded 50 BTC for successfully adding a new block to the blockchain. Yet, Bitcoin experiences halving events every four years, cutting the reward in half, with only 21 million BTC left on the market.
2. Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum launched in 2015 and is the second-largest digital currency by market capitalization. However, it is the first blockchain for smart contracts and dApp development. This open–source crypto exchange is the most popular blockchain network for developers, and the NFTs make it even more appealing.
Its transition to Ethereum 2.0 represented a shift from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
ETH’s current price is $3,173, and its market cap is $381,859,696,529. The circulating supply is 120,228,315 ETH. Moreover, the recently launched Ethereum ETFs could skyrocket demand. ETH has seen a substantial increase: from April 2016 to the end of July 2024, its price has grown by around 31,700%.
Bitcoin acts solely as a speculative asset and store of value. At the same time, Ether has inherent utility as the native token of a highly popular network. ETH is used as an investment by speculators, as a way to pay validators who stake their coins for their blockchain work, and as an off-chain payment method.
3. EOS.IO. (EOS)
The EOS open–source coin was launched in 2017 and represents the powerhouse behind the blockchain-based platform EOS.IO., which is used to develop dApps and access smart contract features through its global infrastructure. The project’s goal is to process millions of transactions in a second.
It also enables staking, with a pool of over 250 million tokens and 85,600 EOS distributed daily. The current EOS price is $0.5738, and the platform has a market cap of $862,324,073. The total token supply is 2,100,000,000, whereas the circulating supply is 1,503,942,465 EOS.
EOS network users share computing resources and can access them depending on their distribution, which is managed considering the stake in coin ownership. So, if the stake is higher, users can “own” more of the network.
With the end goal of funding this ecosystem’s creation, the company had one of the longest ICOs in crypto history, lasting a year. It was also one of the best ICOs, raising more than $4B.
4. Cardano (ADA)
Cardano is a crypto open-source platform founded in 2017 by Ethereum’s co-founder, Charles Hoskinson. This proof-of-stake blockchain aims to create a developer-friendly ecosystem for dApps.
The project has an experienced team, with the researchers behind it having written over 120 papers on many topics concerning blockchain technology. It is safe to say this is one of the cryptocurrencies with the most potential.
Cardano’s interoperability allows seamless communications with many blockchains and legacy financial systems, enabling broad adoption and fostering cross-chain transactions. It’s a decentralized governance model with on-chain voting.
By establishing DeFi products similar to Ethereum’s, Cardano aims to create a financial operation system worldwide. It also wants to provide solutions for voter fraud, chain interoperability, and legal contract tracing.
Cardano’s Hydra upgrade represents a Layer 2 scalability solution that optimizes transaction speed via high throughput and low latency.
The current ADA price is $0.3906, and the market cap is $14,066,908,187. The total token supply is 37,075,829,454, with 35,898,840,010 currently circulating.
5. Stellar (XLM)
Another one of the crypto open–source projects is Stellar. The network launched in 2014 and was created as a decentralized platform allowing inexpensive and fast asset transfers worldwide. In fact, it provides fast processing and lower fees compared to traditional banking systems.
Many project ICOs use Stellar as a launchpad, and token creation is much easier on the Stellar blockchain than on other competing platforms. Some of the projects that had their ICOs on Stellar are SureRemit, The Mobius Network, and Smartlands.
What sets Stellar apart from other cryptos is its consensus mechanism, called the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). It achieves consensus without relying on a closed system for accurate transaction recording. The protocol’s primary features are low latency, decentralized control, security, and flexible trust.
XLM’s current price is $0.1007, and the buying process is simple. Stellar’s market cap is $2,955,016,139. There’s a total token supply of 50,001,786,960, out of which 29,333,656,164 XLM tokens are in circulation.
6. Solana (SOL)
If you are looking for open–source network crypto, check out Solana. It was founded in 2017 but was officially launched in 2020 by the Solana Foundation.
Crypto was built with utility in mind. Solana has gained popularity because it facilitates the easy creation of dApps. Moreover, the key to Solana’s appeal is the low transaction fees, which contribute to its usage and adoption.
Solana runs on unique hybrid proof-of-stake and proof-of-history mechanisms to process transactions securely and quickly.
At the beginning of 2021, SOL made up only 0.01% of the cryptocurrency market’s total value. Still, by June of this year, SOL accounted for 2.98% of the value, translating to a 300-fold growth in its market share.
The current SOL price is $170.94, and it is projected to reach $520.18 by the end of 2030. Solana’s market cap is $79,407,723,035, placing it in the fifth spot in terms of market cap. The total supply is 580,896,373 SOL, out of which 464,616,749 are circulating.
7. Tezos (XTZ)
Tezos is an open–source token that aims to build a self-amending blockchain. The project launched in 2018, and soon after, it gained quick support and raised hundreds of millions in funding.
As it can run smart contracts, Tezos is a versatile platform that can be used for many purposes, like minting NFTs, supporting DeFi and crypto gaming, and developing dApps.
It also allows stakeholders to propose and vote on changes and add disruptive hard forks. Its strategic partnerships boost Tezos’ potential adoption and market presence.
To validate transactions, Tezos uses a system called baking, which is actually the proof-of-stake model, even though Tezos’ version is an alternative called liquid proof-of-stake. Anyone with a minimum of 8,000 XTZ can become a baker and validate transactions on the Tezos blockchain.
The current XTZ price is $0.77, and its market cap is $763,182,074. There’s a total token supply of 1,011,739,529 and a circulating supply of 991,188,145.
8. Polkadot (DOT)
Polkadot is a cryptocurrency open–source platform that launched in 2020. It has its own blockchain and seeks to power the decentralized future of Web 3.0. It works to enhance the fundamental technology that powers dApps. Polkadot’s philosophy is to connect several blockchains, called parachains.
DOT has three primary uses: staking, governance, and bonding. The Polkadot relay chain uses a new Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) consensus to protect its blocks, created to enhance network efficiency and security,
In 2017, Polkadot’s ICO was considered one of the best at the time, raising more than $140M. Yet, much of that portion was frozen because of a Parity wallet vulnerability.
With Polkadot 2.0, a more flexible system was introduced, which allocated backspace and enabled managing the system’s resources on demand.
The current DOT price is $5.86, and the market cap is $8,424,223,689. There’s a total token supply of 1,437,953,431, with a circulating supply of 1,437,953,431.
How Does Open-Source Crypto Work?
Making a cryptocurrency open source is relatively straightforward. All a developer needs to do is make the code behind their cryptocurrency freely available for anyone to view. The majority of popular crypto projects today are open-source.
Open-source crypto projects have several major advantages over cryptocurrencies and software platforms that aren’t open-source.
First, the open-source code for a cryptocurrency can be audited. Developers can inspect the code to ensure there are no bugs or flaws that could allow money to be stolen or one person to take control of a blockchain.
In the world of cryptocurrency, this is incredibly important because cryptocurrencies’ success depends on earning users’ trust. Users are far more likely to trust a blockchain that thousands of developers have examined closely compared to a blockchain that doesn’t share its code, and only a few people know its inner workings.
Another important advantage of open-source cryptocurrencies is that they can be forked. If there’s a major incident, like the 2016 hack on Ethereum, a blockchain’s original code can be copied and modified. Ethereum, as we know it today, is a fork of the original open-source Ethereum blockchain, which continues to operate as Ethereum Classic.
Forking also enables innovation. Forks of Bitcoin like Bitcoin Cash and BitcoinSV offer faster transaction speeds for peer-to-peer payments than Bitcoin itself, for example. Developers have used many more forks to test out new projects, but they haven’t achieved widespread success.
Best Open-Source Crypto Wallets
Users need to trust their crypto wallets as much as they do the blockchain on which a cryptocurrency runs. After all, if a wallet has a bug that allows hackers to access it, an investor could lose some or all of their hard-earned cryptocurrency.
That’s why many crypto wallets are open source. Developers around the world can examine the code of an open-source crypto wallet and report any issues that could endanger users’ funds. Some open-source crypto wallets even offer bounties to developers who spot bugs and alert the team behind the wallet software.
Of course, many crypto wallets aren’t open source. Some wallet developers publish only parts of their source code to offer transparency without giving up their intellectual property. This is especially the case for paid crypto wallets.
If you’re looking for the best open-source cryptocurrency wallet, there are many options. Here are several top crypto wallets that are open-source:
- Metamask
- Electrum
- Mycelium
- AlphaWallet
- MyEtherWallet
Conclusion
Open-source crypto enables anyone to inspect the digital currency’s code, increasing trust and opening new avenues for innovation. For investors in search of the best open-source cryptocurrency in 2024, we recommend Tamadoge and Battle Infinity.
Battle Infinity is developing an open-source metaverse, while Tamadoge is building an open-source play-to-earn crypto game. TAMA is available on presale for a limited time only.