Bitcoin Forum

BNB, XRP, Solana, and Toncoin are in the top 10 based on market cap. However, it seems that tiny numbers actually accept or spend these coins, such as posting them in their donation links if they are a content creator. It seems like these coins represent a large fraction of the market but don't have even a fraction of their purported value of extremely small use cases. Is the value of these niche coins speculative or is it just market-propping?

The coins that you mention are all coins that have a wider use case aside from being used by any freelancer's website as a means of accepting payments and donations.
 
They are coins that run on their own blockchain, and they are also coins that are used to cover up transaction fees for tokens that operate under their network.
 
So now you can see that those coins undergo daily usage, which means there is a need for them every single day. The more new projects launch on any of the blockchains, the more possibilities there are for those coins to be used. 

You are not looking further; you have just based it on your limited perception and observation. These coins have their usage, not just for donations. They have their own community, and their users are using them for transactions for many purposes. Just last week, I paid for my internet connection using BNB.

These coins/tokens can be used for many things, not just for donations and speculation. In fact, there are stores online and offline that are using these coins to pay for their services and products; you have to do your research.

I've used solana to purchased a smartphone online and I've used BNB to pay for hardware wallets and even bought some BTC and alt mining equipments, what are you talking about? This is a freedom space where anyone should use any digital assets that they feel its best for them, we don't have to keep using the same thing this is the idea, all the coins you made mentioned are good ones, even some under top 20 on coinmarketcap.

Donations are the smallest usecase of digital currencies in crypto space, even meme coins that I considered to be pure hype and speculations are good for donations too, yet we have meme coins millionaires around the world, I think you should start doing your own research on coins before coming to conclusions.

I believe where you are getting it wrong is that you are viewing the whole crypto market based on the idea that all the coins that are on the market are the most adopted and popular ones however it isn't so. The number of tokens and coins on the crypto market as just too many to count. However unfortunately a majority of the are a bunch of shit coins and pump dump schemes. Frankly speaking I'm of the opinion that coins that were created based on the intention to be used for transactions and investments are the already old popular coins.

Many coins that are being released today are just schemes that investors use to make more profit by simply pumping them to gain adoption and dumping them later on.

Coins or tokens in the top 50 are considered usable, not just for speculative or market-propping purposes. They are being used by their community on their transactions peer-to-peer to market-to-market. So many coins and tokens have no usage, but those coins and tokens you've mentioned are important in the industry.

We are still in the adoption stage. Soon, these coins and tokens will have their marketplace, or the top marketplace on the internet will integrate them into their system.

Although some coins and tokens have been adopted by small and medium-sized marketplace

I guess you have just shared your point of view about the realty differs especially for the coins you have mentioned because we get to do freelancing and accept payment through these coins and vice versa. I see people buying products using these coins and your point stands true for pump and dump shitcoins but not applicable for the coins you have mentioned.

Unfortunately either people are so blind that they consider scam projects as real service provider or they mistake genuine projects as scam.

Having it as part of their accepted donation cryptocurrency isn't really a matter at all. It's their preference but we have no idea on how much they're holding with such coins.

Every cryptocurrency is speculative. Bitcoin is speculative and so as Ethereum and the others in the crypto market. And that's why if it's about the choice of what to spend, we all have our own choices based on what we think should be accepted. But with the market that these coins have, most of them are just treated to be a store of value or plainly as an asset to hold.

40%?

I would say you are being too lenient. I think about 99% of them have no broad usage, tokens inclusive. Most of them are just created to make the devs and a few individuals rich, with newbies ending up buying hot air and holding bags of a token that keeps declining in price with no future new all-time high.

Their primary use I think isn't really for accepting payment, donation or anything like that the coin itself serve as a gas token for the blockchain and usually people who need to do transaction uses stablecoin inside the blockchain.

these smart contract blockchain coin I think being created with defi or any web3 project that uses their smart contract capability in mind, the fact that they can be used for payment as well is probably just a bonus.
but overall they are more focused on giving people the platform to use their smart contract capability and thats it.

BitPay, one of the leading crypto payment processors, publishes regularly the numbers of transactions per coin on this platform. The most recent numbers from July 2024 are:

- Litecoin - 34.31%
- Bitcoin - 24.97%
- Ethereum - 11.25%
- Bitcoin Cash - 8.83%
- USDC - 5.22%
- Dogecoin - 4.97%
- Polygon (MATIC) - 4.46%

Source: Bitpay (https://bitpay.com/stats/) (archived version (https://archive.is/7ajs1))

It is widely known that LTC is very popular (in relation to its market cap) as a payment tool. And you're correct at least if we look at Bitpay: the coins you mention don't even show up in this top list.

There are other numbers from other merchants which show that Monero is also quite strong in the "payment" category. Like shown here (Shopinbit) (https://x.com/shopinbit/status/1811651225005195471) or here (Coincards) (https://x.com/CoinCards/status/1809702144288882870). The latter has also a relatively high Solana participation. But BNB and XRP don't appear on any of these stats.

In general however I agree with those writing that just the cryptocurrencies mentioned in the OP are known more as "utility coins" (gas) for smart contracts and a tool to create tokens on them. ETH is the only one strong in both "market segments". Toncoin seems to be used mainly in the Telegram ecosystem.

So, are you saying that only "broad usage" of these coins is for donations? Or the fact that less people accept them then eth or btc for example, so that makes them to have less use cases, or what?

Because i would argue that sending is just one use case and many of these chains have same use cases, just different solutions for them. And we can also argue if those other then "send" use cases like smart contracts are anything special, or if we just haven't unlocked their possibilites, but regardless what ever you think of the use cases; that number in the topic "40%" doesn't mean anything. You literally made that up that without any research.

And thats why it would really be that important that you should really be looking into those projects that are really that worth on investing into specially in long term. I wouldnt say that it would be 40% of coins are shit but rather it would be 90% of them are total shit and copy cats and 10% are the ones who do have that kind of relevant utility on which it could really be something helpful and something that will really be considerable and the rest are really just that trying out to copy those ideas and been flooding out or being saturated in the market on which its not really that a shocking thing anymore and been long time have seen into this market. The amazing thing here on this kind of situation that despite on how shitty those coins are they re really that being pumped more with multiple folds specially if there's a whale that would really be moving up those coins without having that reasonable targets on it. This is why you cant really be able to blame out people on why there are really those investors who would really be putting up some risks on investing into these coins despite of the risks level just because of this very reason.

If you are someone who cant really be able to bare up with the risks then it would really be your own choice and its common sense that you would really be sticking into those projects on which you do know
that it would really be good on holding out for long term but of course it wont really be that 100% assurance that it would really be staying up on the market like forever on which we know we cant really just
that ignore that flipping on those old coins with new coins could really be happening and this is where you should really be looking upon.

I think the ratio should be more than 40% and should be increased to around 70% to 80% because that what it is, at some level the cryptocurrency market began to strink down and many were even beginning to ask if bitcoin itself have a usercase, but the unique thing about cryptocurrency coins is that, it holder's are the first ecosystem, because as long as any investors hold the crypto coin, he or she will be contributing directly or indirectly to the growth and development of the coins so the project teams believe this as an automatic ecosystem for the project which is somewhat correct.
Between when taking about a clear business ecosystem, then you can say only a few coins have such clear ecosystem that their provides services for such as being used as utility on those plartforms, e.g BNB which is use for gas fee's on the world biggest cryptocurrency exchange.

you got flawed idea of usage or utility in this case, a coin not being accepted or spent for something like donation to content creator doesn't mean it's underutilized.
the coin itself already serve a different purpose than the one you mentioned, like BNB is utilized to get discount on the binance platform and some other utilization like launchpools, etc.

a coin doesn't need to be accepted for specific thing that align to your idea of utility for it to have utilization.

Here is from Coincards.com you linked to:
#XMR: 34.4%
#BTC (Onchain): 25.96%
#USDC: 20.20%
#ETH: 9.84%
#LTC: 2.49%
#Solana: 2.31%
#Dogecoin: 2.09%
#LightningNetwork: 2.08%
#USDT: 0.58%

I think these lists prove the point I was making, which many 10 coins are NOT substantially exchanged in general market environments outside of exchanges. Thanks for your link.

I do see Solana on that list so I suppose it does have some adoption I didn't know about. People don't pay for things using XMR, Toncoin, or BNB, though apparently do for Solana. And yes there is certain niche utility many coins like BNB coin being used for a website on the BNB website. However, that would seem to make the value of the coin as the underlying discount. I don't think BNB has $75 billion dollars of pending discounts to their services.

If the value of a coin isn't broad market spending such as the Coincards.com list above, then it has very little transactional value. A lot of people make a mistake to say that non-backed currency has NO value, which is false. It still has transactional value according to the total transaction volume. But of course there is also speculation value, and as discussed utility value like the BNB website discount coin. Some coins have other value like Filecoin.

Personally I think most coins have mostly speculative value. I think the only coin that is priced for mostly transactional value is XMR. It has a market cap of something in the neighborhood of $3 billion, and probably does have billions in annual transaction volume. Of course I'm not counting mere exchange volume as exchanging from one coin to another doesn't reflect creation of economic value in the way that buying food or VPN service is.

this is true because 90% of coin these days are just VC play into cashing out their investment and make easy money with 3-100x gain.

a brief look at most of the newer coin tokenomic always look about like this

https://iili.io/dlDFdMv.md.png

big chunk of allocation goes to the investors and i'm pretty dang sure the investors are buying the coin at really cheap price and will immediately dump their token upon token unlocking.

Saying 40% seems like it's even optimistic, I feel like 90% of them do not have any broad usage at all, we are talking about tens of thousands of coins in the world and we do not have broad usage for almost all of them. Even at the top 10, we still have doge and xrp, which has absolutely no usage at all and totally useless coins and yet people like them so they are there.

Today's crypto market is not that healthy, too many people figured out that they could create a token, promote it, airdrop some, make people work to make it famous, and launch, making as much as they can, some make nothing, some make a lot, and they take the money and leave. That is why the crypto market is filled with a lot of projects that worth absolutely nothing.

The top 20 coin by marketcap value including BNB, XRP, Solana and TON are typically focus of serious and long-term investors as they are not considered speculative coins. Their wide-spread use case in transactions is limited. The value is primarily driven by market dynamics, investors sentiment and potentia future use case rather than current adoption.

I always prefer to invest in top-20 coins because they are secure, well established and recognized projects, even though they may not be ideal for short term gains.

I think part of the reason might be that these coins serve more specialized functions within their ecosystems, which may not be directly visible to the average user. For example, BNB is heavily used within the Binance ecosystem for things like transaction fees, which might not translate to broader everyday use. XRP is designed primarily for cross-border payments between financial institutions, so its utility may be more behind the scenes rather than in consumer-facing applications.

That being said, it's also possible that a significant portion of the value of these coins is speculative. The crypto market is still largely driven by investor sentiment and future potential rather than current utility. In some cases, the market cap could indeed be propped up by expectations of future growth or technological advancements rather than current usage.

It's a complex issue, and I wonder if we’ll see a shift in how these coins are utilized as the market matures. Could broader adoption and practical use cases emerge in the coming years, or will these coins remain primarily speculative assets? I’d love to hear more thoughts on this from others who have been following these projects closely.

Exactly, those coins mentioned by the OP has their own use case, and the fact that they're not generally used as compared to Bitcoin doesn't mean they're left behind, those coins have blockchains of their own and projects that building on those blockchains use the said coins daily for Tx fees so I don't think they're left out given their market cap and the number of people that use them daily as Tx fees. For instance Ton is the newly added Blockchain amongst others mentioned and it's trending currently due to it's connection with the social media platform (Telegram) and I'm aware that most mining projects and Airdrops require Ton as fees to claim there rewards and so far the number of participants in those projects is massive and you could imagine the amount of Tx that would be used daily by different participants to claim rewards.

I think the op fails to understand some stuff, and his argument is centered on his experience but not knowing that there are more to what he already about thos coins, if the usage of those coin have such limitations as he mentioned u think it would have been difficult for those coin to go this far, just as you mentioned that you used BNB to pay for your internet connections,some persons use it to pay for transactions fees and so on, although am happy that they op brought this here and I believe he can learn from multiple functions and purpose of this coins,/tokens respectively, this have just shown that no matter how detailed you think you have learned in any system, where you stop is where others started, I think the op would have done a detailed research before saying that few persons or institutions accept the coins/ tokens that he listed, the functions of the listed coins are not limited it only depends on what we actually want.

When you want to "move" money around, or just pay for something, USDT made that quite easy, usually used with TRC20 chain as well, that meant that USDT is good for just transactions and payments all of which means that we may not see other coins for payments or donations.

If you have donation link, and you offer USDT with TRC20 chain, then you are going to get mostly that, it is something that people do enjoy and that's about it, nothing more is needed at that point and I believe that we are going to see that go up as much as possible.

Obviously this isn't a thing that's written somewhere like a rule, I could be wrong and things could change, in a month maybe BNB becomes the most used one, who knows how it will work out. But at the current moment people prefer USDT for moving things around or payments, that makes it a lot easier because it is both cheap, but it is also exact amount, doesn't change in the future, and you know what you sent with that kind of payment.

Investing in a coin by a direct purchase of the coin IS speculation, unless it is done based on specific usage statistics that have it undervalued relative to other coins, which generally center on actual usage in broad retail transactions. It would be like investing in stock without the specific plan to cash out on dividends. Almost anything other than cashing out dividends is a form of speculative investment in stocks. With a cryptocurrency, there are even fewer options that are not speculation.

I guess you need to do your homework right. BNB is being used on it's smartchain.
It also covers transaction fees on the exchange and also facilitate payments.
Solana also has a whole lot of usecases and both of these have their ecosystems and can also be used for staking.
Toncoin is relatively new but is starting to have it's own ecosystem too and receiving a decent response from the crypto community.

You mentioned top 10 ranking coins BNB,SOLANA,XRP and TON coin, And asked what's the use cases of those project? Without any real use cases those are ranked in the top crypto?
It seems your lack of knowledge about these coins. I have experienced to use these coins in my real life such as i bought a lot of things of using these coins, Still sometimes i need use them in my daily life. And those have own smartchain, and huge of use cases and real products from long time.

Those coins mentioned wont really be sitting on top of the market if they werent have their good use cases on which it really that definitely true about BNB and SOL on which these two are really that having
that competition on trying to take up that higher spot on which we've seen this thing recently. It cant really be just that denied that these things are both having that good potential but since they are already
sitting on top #10 then i would say that its really that their end game. 40% is really just that too low if we do speak about into this topic in terms of use case or its utility on which i do see even more higher and only
10% of them are really just that actually having that relevant feature on which human kind would really be able to make use of it and the rest on which it turns out to be that useless and just copy cats.

The good thing about these copycats is that if you do really tend to take risks on investing into these tokens/coins is that on the moment that it will really be making up some moonshot then
you would really be definitely having that chance on making yourself that getting rich and this is the primary thing on why there's so much demand when it comes to these coins
including meme coins or with those low caps. People wouldnt really be minding much about the risks involved into it.

Exactly, BNB is mostly used for projects, TON is following the same path and any other coin can replace XRP, it is just a disguised coin. It makes no sense to ask for these coins as a donation in your content creation, as they are not commonly used for that.

Why? I don't think @OP was wrong to mention these coins, BNB is one of shitcoin that listed on top 10, it has no use case. It just a copycat of ETH, the coin is used to encourage people to use Binance, while the chain isn't 100% secure and no use case too. If people said BSC help many project, well Binance Smart Chain and Binance Chain are two different chain, don't mix it.

I believe, on your own part it may be right. But I think there is something wrong with your comment. But it is good for you to know that the top ranking coins in the market work with the biggest organizations. And all these coins do not require any analyses. But if you want to see its details then you can do it at your own risk. I think, if you are in 500+ ranking, you will definitely need analyzes if you are a trader. However, the coins you mentioned are the most used.

I’d argue that more than 40% of coins have zero real world utility, they are just a speculative way to try & get more fiat or more Bitcoin/Ethereum. You’re never going to be able to buy a Spot $MOTHER ETF. It doesn’t mean you can’t make serious money with these coins, just get in & get out with profit.

That's why it's so important to invest in projects that have something behind them, that way you can make even more profit. You can get involved in a project that's just speculative, but the chances of it being successful are very low, unlike coins with projects behind them. So, always look for this to increase your profits.

Actually there's no assurance on making profits with investing into certain projects no matter how good looking it would be but as part of making up some research then you could really be able to
point out at least on which project would really be something that would really be worth of your money. Although every step that you would really be that making will really be definitely be still that speculative on which we know that assurance on making profits isnt there. It would really still that a matter of demand and recognition for a project to have that kind of success. This is why its important that you should really be making your own research and trying out to make an in depth one because if you do just make decisions without having that backed up with good research then the risks is
high on losing money on the time that you do deal up with shit projects.

Of course, coins have their own governance to determine the number of crypto assets in circulation, more centralized where there is someone who controls governance, there are so many requests for these coins that are considered to be profitable, but all of that requires demand for one crypto asset to soar if many supporters use it, along with the use of many coins causing an increase in price, depending on the project being run to measure all of that.

This should be something that could make a ton of money without a lot of trouble, we can't really assume that it is going to be at all easily handled. So we can't really consider how this could work, that could be the most important part of the investment one could make. That can't really change any further without a doubt, so that could be very troublesome if we are not careful with what we have.

So all in all it is going to cause a lot of benefit for people who stay away from centralized projects that doesn't do much community caring, because they are doing it all for their own versions. This is why I believe that we can't make see it changing and we need to consider this to be profitable if we keep on thinking that it is going to reach to a big place without a doubt. I do believe that it can't be considered any different if it's decentralized but weak coded, because those could be hacked into as well and we saw a lot of examples of that too.

Those coins that you mentioned looks solid in my opinion. So I don't understand why you say that tiny numbers are being used by people with this coins. You will have to look at the trading volumes and see for yourself that there are usage.

As for donations link by content creator, yeah, why not? I mean as I have said, they have use case and so it could be one of the cases, as means of payment. So you might have a wrong perception of those top 10 coins and you can used it whatever you want, store of value, means to accept payment and others. Definitely there could be element of speculation as most of the coins are even Bitcoin.

exactly that, but to be fair, most of the project right now are motivated to do research and innovation so that they can deploy their own token and become millionaire out of it.
we know the market always overvalue most of the project so they just takes advantage of it.

so it should be the market itself that should be conscious enough not to overvalue a project with zero utility and usage.
unfortunately the market just like hypes and the money always flowing around the hypes, it's also the exact reason why meme coin valued so high in the first place.

utility don't really matter when hype is there.

Yes, I agree, but he will have a better chance of making a profit from projects with a foundation than from projects without. And worst of all, it is impossible for him to guess the next meme coin, it may not even exist. Supporting this for me is madness and a waste of time and money.

For the most part almost every coin on the market doesn't provide anything new or of value at this point. Bitcoin solved mostly everything when it was created.  15 years later amd Satoshis original foundation still holds strong.  It's a testament of how much they put into the thought process of everything that is needed or can happen to the protocol.  Lots of works has been done on it but yeah bitcoin does mostly everything that's needed.  Not saying in the future it will be the same but most of those coins are basically here to day trade for degens  :)

depends on the project also, if the project is not that great, the coin will be useless too, the reason why blockchain project that are L1 could have really big market cap because the coin actually utilized for something and it's to pay gas fee and so on, the demand produced because of that will always be there as long as the blockchain still produces block and there's still transaction in the blockchain.

different if the coin with a project behind it have no utility at all that could give worth to the coin, it will become a waste and can be categorized as coin that have no broad usage.
example is W (wormhole). good project enabling interoperability but their coin is wasted because the sole purpose for delegation of voting. now the price went down so bad.

literally went down so much from ATH