Big Questions: Do we really only need 2–5 cryptocurrencies?

There were 20 kings of crypto back in January 2017. Dash. Augur. NEM. Stratis. They sat in the top 20 by market capitalization. They commanded billions in collective value. They attracted developers and retail investors who believed they were buying the future of money.

As of May 2026, however, none remain in the top 20 by market capitalization. Only a handful of 2017 survivors like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP still hold top positions today, underscoring crypto’s high attrition rate. Several projects have ceased development with their communities dissolving when the price did.

The question this raises is not why the death of high-hype projects actually raises is not how many projects have died. It is how many of the survivors are necessary. 

Those dead cryptocurrencies have been replaced by millions more, if you include the memecoins churned out by launchpads like Pump.fun. Of the less transient projects,  CoinGecko currently tracks more than 15,000 cryptocurrencies, while Messari’s more rigorous methodology narrows the field to around 250 crypto projects worth monitoring.

Among those 250, how many are truly doing something useful and different that actually justifies their existence? 

The top 10 coins from March 2017 (YouTube)

Nic Puckrin, co-founder of Coin Bureau, sees no reason to expect the graveyard to stop filling. “More often than not,” he says, “once an altcoin falls 90%, it won’t recover.” 

Most altcoins are currently 90% or more below their all-time highs, so the market may already have delivered its verdict.

The case for Bitcoin

Of course if you ask hardcore Bitcoiners how many cryptocurrencies are worthwhile, they’ll tell you there is only room for one. 

The Bitcoin maximalist position is often caricatured as tribalism dressed up as economics. Proponents argue that money is a winner-takes-most competition, with the winner determined by how many people accept it, how liquid it is, and how trusted it is. 

Michael Saylor has gone all in on Bitcoin.

Gold didn’t share its monetary premium with silver proportionally. The internet didn’t produce five equally dominant protocols at the TCP/IP layer. Why would digital money be different?

Beau Turner, CEO and co-founder of Abundant Mines, argues the market has already delivered its answer given Bitcoin commands more than 60% of the entire $2.6 trillion crypto market alone. 

“If that isn’t a definitive signal that the market has chosen Bitcoin as the ultimate form of money,” he says, “I don’t know what is.”

Turner argues that the “crypto industry” does everyone a disservice. It constantly chases new projects when something that has “already proven true and complete” exists. 

JJ Thompson, Head of BD at Pogun, takes a less absolute but similarly directional view. In his view Bitcoin has pulled far enough ahead that direct comparisons with other assets are less meaningful.

 “Bitcoin’s role has always been clearer and less ambiguous than many other assets,” he says. “Long-term holders tend to have a well-defined thesis and are less easily shaken.” 

Andreas Brekken, founder of SideShift.ai, occupies an interesting middle ground. He agrees that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency needed as money, but thinks other chains have brought genuine technical innovation that Bitcoin couldn’t deliver. 

His conclusion, though, does not support the need for many different cryptocurrencies. “Their native tokens,” he says of chains like Ethereum and Solana, “will trend towards zero against Bitcoin because network fees are in a race to the bottom.”

Other chains need their own tokens anyway

There are, however, some problems with Brekken’s arguments.

Networks need native tokens to pay validators, incentivise node operators, and fund development. Without a native asset, there is no economic mechanism to secure the chain. 

Uniswap has a governance token, the value of which is debated. (Uniswap)

You cannot run a proof-of-stake network on someone else’s currency without replicating it or subordinating your security model to another chain’s ecosystem. 

Many projects have launched tokens they don’t need. But that is a different problem from claiming no project ever needs one.

Carlos Esteves, Head of Ecosystem at Umia, says that cryptocurrencies and tokens fall into different categories. “We only need approximately three cryptocurrencies,” he says, “but we need hundreds of tokens built on those networks.”

For Esteves, a cryptocurrency’s core function is to serve as the asset that secures a permissionless network. That is the economic bedrock.

Tokens built on top of those networks function as capital formation tools, utility instruments, governance mechanisms, fee-sharing vehicles. They are not competing to “be” money. They are not competing to be infrastructure.

The distinction matters, as it reframes the whole debate. BNB provides discounts on trading fees. The HYPE token powering Hyperliquid distributes fee revenue back to holders through buybacks. This is a model that Puckrin describes as having “strong fundamentals.” The exchange’s success has proven genuinely difficult to replicate.

Governance tokens of more questionable value exist too, allowing holders a vote on major protocol decisions. These are not, however, altcoins trying to be Bitcoin. They are something structurally different. Evaluating them against Bitcoin’s monetary properties is the wrong test.

The case for a handful: XRP, ETH, SOL

Which cryptocurrencies will go the distance, in the end? 

CEO at Nebula DeFi, Jason Rindahl, makes the clearest argument for why Bitcoin and Ethereum are not competing for the same thing. 

“The flaw in that framing,” he says of the Bitcoin-versus-Ethereum debate, “is assuming there is only one lane for monetary premium in crypto.” 

Ethereum is the most obvious candidate.

For Rindahl, the distinction is architectural and functional rather than tribal. “Bitcoin is the base layer of trust and value storage. Ethereum is the layer where that value becomes productive.” One stores value in the most secure, conservative, maximally decentralised system available. The other runs the financial applications that make stored value useful.

Brian Huang, co-founder of Glider, goes further on Ethereum’s structural position, arguing that Ethereum and the plethora of EVM-compatible chains represent something closer to a monopoly in the making. 

“Over the next decade, all of the world’s assets will get tokenized,” he says, “and the vast majority will be on Ethereum or EVM-compatible chains.” 

His analogy is precise: “EVM is like Linux — open, permissionless, and lindy.” 

Even corporate entrants have embraced the standard, with Stripe’s Tempo and Robinhood’s Hood chain both building on EVM compatible infrastructure. Huang’s conclusion is that Ethereum has already won the smart contract platform race.

Are any of these coins really necessary? (CoinGecko)

The case for privacy

The privacy argument introduces another factor that is not yet fully resolved across the cryptocurrency space. 

Bitcoin transactions are pseudonymous but permanently traceable. The blockchain analytics industry, however, now provides transaction tracing to government clients globally, and the on-chain record never disappears. 

Rindahl argues that financial privacy is “a fundamental human right that becomes more important as the world becomes more digital and more surveilled,” and that zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs represent the technology that resolves the tension between privacy and regulatory compliance. 

ZK proofs can already make Ethereum transactions private and compliant. They cannot yet do the same for Bitcoin. If financial privacy is a legitimate and necessary function, then the current technical reality points to a need for at least a second chain beyond Bitcoin to serve it. Whether that means a dedicated privacy chain like ZCash or Monero, or simple private transactions on an Ethereum Layer-2 is the open question. The function itself cannot be waved away.

What the market actually selects for

It’s clear there are far too many cryptocurrencies and tokens on the market, a hangover from the speculative frenzy of previous bull runs. 

Dogecoin remains in the top 10 by market capitalization, but does anyone argue it’s really necessary? It was created as a joke, has no development roadmap, no fixed supply cap, and no technical innovation of any kind.

A glance across the top 50 shows many other zombie projects that no longer serve a useful function or live up to their early promise.

JJ Thompson sees natural forces beginning to correct this, with market activity “increasingly concentrating around a smaller number of more resilient projects that have delivered.” 

The altcoin graveyard is now filled with projects that peaked in 2021 and have since lost 90% or more of their value against both Bitcoin and the US dollar. 

Doge is much wow but also inessential at best

Name the cryptocurrencies that survive

Cointelegraph asked everyone we spoke to the same question: if you had to name the cryptocurrencies that will still matter in 20 years, what is your list?

The answers converge more than the crypto industry’s tribal dynamics might suggest. Bitcoin appears on every list without exception. Ethereum appears on almost all of them. Beyond that, the consensus frays.

Puckrin names Ethereum for its native yield and institutional adoption, and Solana for having survived its near-death experience in 2022. He also lists SUI for technical innovation, and HYPE for the fundamental strength of Hyperliquid’s business model. He says assets with ETFs tracking them are supported by a floor of passive institutional demand.

Rindahl’s list runs to Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and SUI. His selection criterion is explicitly functional: “not hype — function, trajectory, and whether the network is solving a real bottleneck at scale.” 

XRP, he says, is positioned for institutional and cross-border payments. Solana handles consumer-scale throughput. SUI represents next-generation architecture.

Huang declines to name individual tokens beyond ETH, arguing the real answer is the EVM ecosystem as a whole, as a standard rather than a single asset.

The answers people gave sketch a rough consensus: there is room for one dominant monetary asset, which will almost certainly be Bitcoin. 

One dominant programmable settlement layer, most likely Ethereum and its EVM-compatible ecosystem. 

Possibly one high-throughput application chain for use cases that Ethereum’s architecture cannot serve cost-effectively. 

And, a privacy solution of some kind, if the regulatory environment empowers it to survive. On top of all of that, there is space for a long tail of tokens. These are not cryptocurrencies in the base-layer sense, but application-layer instruments serving specific functions within those networks.

But beware, history has shown the tokens and applications popular today may not survive the next cycle’s cull.