Cryptocurrency list: coins sorted by purpose

A complete list of every cryptocurrency is worth little to an investor. As of October 25, 2026, CoinGecko tracks around 22,500 active cryptocurrencies, and the whole market weighs in at roughly $2.71 trillion. Bitcoin alone accounts for 59.5 percent of that, Ethereum for another 10.5 percent. The rest is spread across everything else, and there the amounts fall quickly to levels where a single sale moves the price.

A list only becomes useful once it is sorted by purpose. A means of payment, a platform for programs, a token pegged to the dollar and a tokenised security solve entirely different jobs, carry different risks and are treated differently in Germany. The overview below goes through those groups, names the largest members of each and gives an order of magnitude as of October 25, 2026.

The ranking by market capitalisation is always available and up to date on our table of the largest coins. This page sorts the same names by job rather than by size.

Means of payment: Bitcoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash move value without an account

The oldest group pursues the original purpose: sending value from A to B without a bank booking it in between. Satoshi Nakamoto described that in the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 as a payment system without a trusted intermediary.