Bitcoin arrived in 2009 with the idea of being digital cash that works without banks or any other central party. To the surprise of many, including the aforementioned banks, it was a huge success. So, developers from all over the world didn't stop there. Over the years, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of tokens would gravitate around Bitcoin —creating the vast crypto market we know today.

So far, according to CoinMarketCap (CMC), there are about 32.85 million tokens in the wild. Not all of them are useful, not all of them are active, not all of them have real users or liquidity. It's worth asking: why are they necessary at all, if Bitcoin supposedly already did the job of a decentralized digital currency? Why so many? Well, let’s see.

Why New Cryptocurrencies Keep Appearing

Imagine you’re a developer, your girlfriend’s birthday is around the corner, she’s away, and you want to give her an original gift remotely. So, you create a completely new, customized cryptocurrency for her! This already happened, by the way. And it happened, and it can keep happening, because the technology behind cryptocurrencies is open to anyone. That’s called open-source, including a public license, so everyone and their dog can copy and paste the Bitcoin code (fork) and create their own thing with it.

As a consequence, most tokens around don’t offer much, but they were created for many different reasons. Birthdays could be memes, too. Dogecoin and other memecoins were jokes that got out of control. There are also ideologies and utilities, though.

Bitcoin is the first one and still the most popular, but it’s not perfect. It lacks features like privacy or complex (Turing-complete) smart contracts, for instance. Therefore, numerous teams have been building new crypto networks and tokens with more functions and even different structures. Some power decentralized apps, others run games, coordinate online communities, or provide private transactions. Each ecosystem tends to mint its own token, since tokens are how rules, incentives, and access get enforced on-chain. And every chain is an island: you can't use BTC on Ethereum or GBYTE on Bitcoin directly, for example.

Crypto community argues a lot, too. About fees, speed, privacy, governance, values, and even how large blocks should be. When arguments get stuck, groups split and build their own version instead of compromising. This is how many altcoins were born. New networks promise different trade-offs: lower costs, different security models, more privacy, or fewer intermediaries.

Not Everyone Survives, But…

There may be millions of tokens in existence, but if the focus shifts to coins that are actively traded, listed on exchanges, and updated by someone, the number drops sharply. Not every cryptocurrency is destined to survive, either because it was just a joke, a scam, or because it couldn’t find enough users, it wasn’t technically sound, or its team abandoned it. Despite this, everyone is welcome to try. You don’t even need to be a developer to create your own customized token.

In Obyte, a simple wallet chatbot can guide you to create a personal asset, or you can use the online Asset Registry. The whole process only takes minutes and has minimal fees. This new token could be anything: royalty points for a company, a representation of some real-world assets, the coin of a game, or even a gift or memecoin. It’s totally up to you and your needs.

Besides, this asset will live inside the solid, resilient ecosystem that Obyte is. Born in 2016, Obyte was created to offer a new level of decentralization not available in other networks. Its Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure without miners, “validators,” or any other middleman, was designed to avoid censorship, extend access, and improve autonomy in decentralized apps, smart contracts, and crypto payments.

Remember: not every coin will survive, but some of them are already offering real utility. If you create a new one, welcome to this permissionless lab!

Featured Vector Image by lexamer/Freepik