Ethereum (https://ethereum.org/)

Ethereum is a decentralized powerful global platform that is based on blockchain technology and features smart contracts. Ether is the incentive or more simply a fundamental digital coin thats is given to developers for writing quality applications. Ether is used to pay services and run application on the network.

A crypto programmer VitalikButerin proposed the concept of Ethereum (ETH) in year 2013. 11.9 millions digital coins were pre-mined initially for the crowd-sale. Despite of a split in 2016 the value of Ethereum currency noticed a steep increase of 13000 percent in 2017.

Ripple (https://ripple.com/)

Ripple was developed by Ryan Fugger in year 2004. Using the Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) users can instantly transfer money. Best is that by incorporating Ripple protocol banking and non banking companiesfacilitate their customers to use their services.

In short, by using Ripple users can quickly process their customer’s payments anywhere in the world. Further, by using digital asset XRP banks can considerably reduce their transaction costs. All such features have made Ripple the third largest digital currency in terms of market cap ($18,773,298,679 - reference https://coinmarketcap.com/all/vi...). It is represented by a symbol XRP.

Bitcoin Cash (https://www.bitcoincash.org/)

In mid 2017 Bitcoin cash came into existence after a change called hard fork. The hard fork was actually supported by biggest mining company and ASIC chip manufacturers to increase the block size. Represented by BCH in less than a year time it has captured a market cap of $12,940,921,856. This enabled BCH to hold the fourth spot in this list.

Making peer-to-peer transactions more economical and reliable BCH aims to make crypto market more promising. After the fork Bitocin holders of block 478558 possesses the same number of Bitcoin cash.

Litecoin (https://litecoin.com/)

Based on the Open Source Cryptographic Protocol Litecoin is the fifth largest crypto coin by market cap. Not managed by any single central authority it is represented by the symbol LTC or even XLT. Charlie Lee introduced LTC in year 2011 via an open source client GitHub.

Having full compatibility with Bitcoin API Litecoin is easy to integrate with systems using Bitcoin. Best is that it processes a block every 2.5 minutes which is much slower compared to Bitcoin. This obviously gives it a trademark transactional speed making it much efficient to use electronic coin preferable for small purchases.

Apart from this, there are few other virtual coins that are also making firm mark in digital currency market. These new coins also look promising and are growing swiftly. For better comprehension here are few prominent ones:

IOTA (https://www.iota.org/)
NEO (https://neo.org/)
DASH (https://www.dash.org/)
Monero (https://monero.org/)
EOS (https://eos.io/)