You’ll find both “coins” and “tokens” listed at the Markets.Bitcoin.com main page, alongside their prices, market caps, volumes, and more.
Generally, coins are the native currency built into a blockchain, whereas tokens are created “on top of” a blockchain. Tokens can be created to represent stocks, votes, reward points, virtual items, deeds, titles―anything you want, and they inherit the benefits of their underlying blockchain:
- They can be exchanged without needing a trusted third party to oversee the transfer
- You can prove that you own your tokens without verification from a third party
- They can be sent from anyone in the world to anyone else in the world, no restrictions
- Token transactions are censorship-resistant, meaning that it’s extremely difficult to prevent your transaction from occurring
Those benefits come together to give you control over your own assets, similarly to how cryptocurrencies give you control over your money.
At Bitcoin.com, we’re enthusiastic about any tool that gives people more control over the things that belong to them. That’s why we have launched our Featured Tokens page, where we will shine the spotlight on token projects that meet our listing standards.
For tokens themselves to be useful, the token platform itself must make it easy to create, send, and receive tokens, and all those actions need to be inexpensive. The Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) was recently defined for the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, and it provides an exceptional user experience in all of those aspects.
- Anyone can create an SLP token using free and open-source tools
- SLP tokens can be sent, received, and verified with a “light” wallet, no need to run a full node
- SLP Transactions are as inexpensive as Bitcoin Cash transactions: less than a cent indefinitely
To show our support for the growing SLP ecosystem, we will initially focus on featuring SLP token projects. Featured tokens will eventually be added to our main markets page, as development progresses.
Bitcoin.com will be accepting applications to have tokens listed on our Featured Tokens page, and we will also be offering consultation services to projects and businesses that want to launch their own SLP tokens. Details will be announced at a later date.
Be sure to check out our featured tokens at https://markets.bitcoin.com/tokens.