Altcoin
Altcoin is a catch-all term for any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin — thousands of assets with wildly different purposes, designs, and levels of substance.
The label groups together things that have little in common beyond not being bitcoin. Ethereum, which runs smart contracts, sits in the same bucket as a token created as a joke. Treating "altcoins" as a single asset class obscures far more than it reveals.
Some serve a genuine technical function: paying for computation on a network, granting a vote in a protocol’s governance, or representing a claim on an underlying asset. Others exist mainly as objects of speculation, with a white paper and marketing but no working product behind them.
Liquidity is a defining risk. Bitcoin trades in enormous volume across many venues; a small altcoin may depend on one or two exchanges, meaning a modest sell order can move the price sharply and exiting a position in a falling market can be difficult or impossible.
The sector attracts fraud. Pump-and-dump schemes, tokens whose contracts prevent selling, and projects abandoned after raising funds are all common. Regulators in several jurisdictions treat many tokens as securities offered without authorisation, and enforcement actions are frequent.
TrustFinance News tracks regulatory warnings and enforcement across the crypto sector, so readers can see which venues and issuers regulators have flagged.