Guide · Markets
What Is an Altcoin?
"Altcoin" gets used constantly in crypto conversation, but it covers an enormous range of risk — from established projects to speculative micro-caps.
Altcoin is short for "alternative coin" — any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. The term dates back to when Bitcoin was effectively the only cryptocurrency that mattered, and everything else was defined relative to it.
That original framing hasn't aged perfectly. Today "altcoin" is used to describe both large, established networks like Ethereum with years of infrastructure and adoption, and brand-new, thinly-traded tokens with almost no track record — two categories with wildly different risk profiles grouped under one label.
This is why market cap and trading volume matter more than the altcoin label itself when sizing up an asset: a top-10 altcoin by market cap behaves very differently from a token that launched last month, even though both technically fit the same one-word category.
Trade2Spike lets you trade a range of major cryptocurrencies alongside Bitcoin using the same virtual balance, which makes it straightforward to compare how differently an established altcoin moves compared to Bitcoin itself, with zero capital at risk while you get a feel for it.