Major blockchains

Thousands of blockchains exist, but a handful matter most for finance today. These are the main public ones to know, with the year each went live and its native token, the token built into it.

• Bitcoin (2009, BTC): the first blockchain. It uses proof of work and is mostly used to send and hold bitcoin, which many people treat as a store of value, like digital gold.
• Ethereum (2015, ETH): the first major blockchain built to run smart contracts. Many tokens, stablecoins and tokenized funds were first issued here. It switched from proof of work to proof of stake in September 2022, in an upgrade called the Merge, which cut its energy use by about 99.95%.
• Solana (2020, SOL): a proof of stake blockchain built for speed and very low fees. It also uses a timekeeping system called proof of history to put transactions in order quickly.
• XRP Ledger (2012, XRP): built for fast, low-cost payments. It uses neither mining nor staking. Instead, each server picks a list of validators it trusts, and a new batch of transactions is confirmed once more than 80% of them agree.
• Algorand (2019, ALGO): founded by MIT professor Silvio Micali. It uses a version of proof of stake that picks validators at random, so payments are final within a few seconds and can’t be undone.

Each one makes different trade-offs between speed, cost, security and how many independent parties run it, and those choices shape the risks of using it. A network with fewer validators can be faster, but it puts more trust in fewer hands. A very popular network can get slow and expensive when it’s busy. What matters most depends on what you’re using the network for.