Bitcoin Forum

I see people always confuse about coin and token. So what are these?

Basically, a coin has it own blockchain, we can call it “native currency”. There are 2 kinds of the coin:

• Coins which were built based on an original codebase coin such as Dogecoin, Litecoin,… which based on Bitcoin’s codebase
• Coins which were built on independent blockchain such as Ethereum, ICON,…

Different from coin, token was built on an existence blockchain. There are also 2 kinds of token:

• Utility token which is used for accessing products or services such as Pundi X is used as a payment in their retail system.
• A security token is considered as an investment and complies with SEC such as Polymath is a blockchain protocol that facilitates the issuance and distribution of legally compliant token-based securities.

In some cases, a token can change to coin. This phase we call it “swap” to main-net: EOS and Vechain now has their own blockchain and no longer run on Ethereum Blockchain