Coin or token: the 20 largest crypto assets compared

A coin has a blockchain of its own, a token sits on somebody else's blockchain. That is the whole difference between coin and token, and it decides which fee you pay when you send, who is allowed to change the rules, and what happens when you pick the wrong network on a withdrawal.

How large that difference is in practice shows in the ranking. Among the 20 largest crypto assets by market capitalisation, October 26, 2026 counts thirteen coins and seven tokens (our own analysis of market data from CoinGecko). The seven tokens together weigh in at around $317 billion, the thirteen coins at a good $2,230 billion. The majority of the big names therefore run a blockchain of their own, while the majority of all listed crypto assets do not. Of the 22,501 entries CoinGecko lists on the same day, 6,070 carry a contract on Ethereum.

This article sorts out both terms, shows the common types of token, explains the fee rule that catches many newcomers the first time, and sets out what supervisors and the tax office in Germany make of the distinction. If your first question is what a cryptocurrency actually is, read our primer on that.

Coin or token: the difference sits in having a blockchain of its own

A coin is the native means of payment of its own blockchain. It comes into being through the rules of that network itself, it is created by its nodes, and with it you pay for transactions in precisely that network. A token, by contrast, is an entry in a smart contract that runs on an existing blockchain. It has no infrastructure of its own, no nodes of its own and no cryptography of its own. It borrows all of that.

The comparison with a currency and a voucher carries a long way, as long as nobody overstretches it. Bitcoin is the coin of the Bitcoin blockchain: without it there would be no network, and without the network there would be no bitcoin. A token such as Chainlink's LINK token is a program that somebody published on Ethereum. Were Ethereum to fail, LINK in its present form could no longer be transferred. Were Chainlink to fail, Ethereum would carry on unmoved.

That direction of dependency is the heart of the matter. The blockchain carries the token, and the token never carries the blockchain, which is where everything else in this article follows from.

What is a coin? The native means of payment of a layer-1 blockchain

Layer 1 denotes the base layer of a blockchain, meaning the network that produces blocks itself and confirms its transactions itself. Every layer-1 blockchain has exactly one coin, and that coin performs three jobs there at once.

First, it pays the fee. Send a transfer on Bitcoin and you pay in bitcoin; do something on Ethereum and you pay in ether. Second, in many networks it secures the protocol: under proof of stake, validators deposit units of the coin as a pledge and lose it if they cheat. Third, it is the reward with which the network pays its own operators.

That is why a coin cannot be produced in an afternoon. Behind it stand a protocol, consensus rules and a network of machines that somebody has to run. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, XRP, Solana, Cardano and Tron are coins in this sense. Many of them fall under the collective term altcoins, which simply means everything except bitcoin and says nothing about the technical form.

Token: an entry in the smart contract of somebody else's blockchain

A smart contract is a program that sits on a blockchain and runs to fixed rules every time it is called. A token is nothing other than a table inside such a program: a list of addresses and the amount belonging to each address. Send a token and the contract deducts the amount from you and credits it to the recipient. The coin that changes hands in the process does not exist; there is only an altered entry.

That explains why tokens are so numerous. Issuing a token requires no network, no validators and no mining hardware, only a few dozen lines of code and the fee for publishing them. The count reflects that: the 6,070 entries with an Ethereum contract in the CoinGecko list are merely the ones that made it into a directory at all.

The same ease is the flip side. Behind a coin there is always a running network; behind a token there is sometimes no more than a contract somebody wrote in an hour. The technical form therefore says nothing about the quality of a project, though it does say something about the effort behind it.

The 20 largest crypto assets: 13 coins and 7 tokens

The theory becomes tangible once the ranking is counted through. On October 26, 2026 the twenty largest crypto assets by market capitalisation look like this (market data from CoinGecko, as of Monday morning):

Coins with a blockchain of their own (13): Bitcoin, Ether, BNB, XRP, Solana, Tron, Zcash, Hyperliquid, Dogecoin, Monero, Cardano, Stellar and NEAR.

Tokens on somebody else's blockchain (7): Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), Figure Heloc, USDS, WhiteBIT Token, Chainlink (LINK) and LEO.

Two things stand out. First, the coins sit at the front: the thirteen carry around $2,230 billion of the $2,709 billion this list weighs in total. Second, four of the seven tokens are stablecoins. The largest token by a wide margin is Tether at around $182 billion, which puts it ahead of every coin except bitcoin and ether.

Look deeper into the list and the pattern holds: among the 100 largest crypto assets, 39 of the tokens run on Ethereum, eight on the BNB Chain, five on Solana and three each on Arbitrum and Tron. Ethereum is therefore the home blockchain of most large tokens, and has been for years.

ERC-20, BEP-20 and TRC-20: what the token standards stand for

A token standard is a list of functions every contract has to offer so that wallets and exchanges understand it. On Ethereum that standard is called ERC-20, set down in EIP-20. It states that a contract must be able to name its total supply, report the balance of an address and execute a transfer: six functions and two events, no more.

That frugality is the reason for its success. A wallet that handles ERC-20 can display any ERC-20 token, including one created only yesterday. Other blockchains have copied the standard: on the BNB Chain it is called BEP-20, on Tron TRC-20, and the functions are largely the same.

What matters in practice is the consequence: the same token can exist on several blockchains, and those versions are separate contracts. Tether exists as an ERC-20 on Ethereum and as a TRC-20 on Tron. Both are called USDT and both are worth one dollar, yet they are not the same piece of software, and they do not sit on the same blockchain.

Types of token: utility tokens, governance tokens and security tokens

The technical form says where a token runs. Which types of token exist depends instead on what it is for. Three categories come up most often in practice.

Utility tokens provide access to a service. The EU regulation MiCA defines them in Article 3(1)(9) as a crypto asset intended solely to provide access to a good or a service supplied by its own issuer. An example from our own coverage is Quant's QNT token, with which licence fees are settled.

Governance tokens grant voting rights in a protocol. Holders may vote on proposals, on fee levels or on the distribution of a treasury, for instance. UNI from Uniswap and AAVE are well-known representatives. The voting right applies within the protocol, not within a company: a governance token is not a share in a firm.

Security tokens, by contrast, represent exactly that: a claim that otherwise sits in a security, such as a bond or a share of profits. In Germany the Act on Electronic Securities governs this form, and securities law applies to it rather than crypto law. Anyone wanting to offer such instruments needs the corresponding permission from BaFin.

Alongside those there are variants that fit none of the three boxes: LP tokens, which document the share in a liquidity pool in the DeFi sphere, or tokens that represent a deposit in staking. Technically they too are nothing other than entries in a contract.

Non-fungible tokens: when every unit is unique

All the tokens named so far are fungible tokens: every unit equals every other, just as one ten-euro note equals any other ten-euro note. A non-fungible token, NFT for short, reverses that. Every unit carries a number of its own, and the contract keeps individual pieces with their owners rather than mere amounts.

Technically an NFT is therefore the same thing as an ERC-20 token, only with different bookkeeping: instead of “address A holds 500 units” it reads “address A holds piece number 4711”. The standard for it on Ethereum is called ERC-721. What that piece means, whether a picture, an admission ticket or a land-register entry, is set by the contract and not by the blockchain.

The tokenisation of real assets works by the same procedure: a property, a fund unit or an ounce of gold is given a digital counterpart on a blockchain. Whether that turns into robust ownership is decided by the contract behind it and by the law of the country in question, not by the technology.

Stablecoins carry coin in the name and are tokens all the same

The name misleads, and it does so reliably. A stablecoin is as a rule a token, even with the word coin inside it. USDT, USDC, DAI and PYUSD run as contracts on Ethereum, Tron, Solana and further blockchains; not one of them has a blockchain of its own.

That is more than a question of terminology. Holding USDT makes you dependent on two things: on the issuer that manages the backing, and on the blockchain its contract sits on. With a coin the first dependency falls away, and in exchange there is nobody standing behind the value.

The same risk of confusion runs in the other direction. In everyday use every project is called a “coin” sooner or later, even when it is a token. For your purchase decision that makes no difference; for the question of which network you choose on a withdrawal it very much does. At large crypto exchanges the withdrawal form therefore asks for the network the token sits on alongside the name.

Fees: every token transfer costs the coin of its blockchain

This is where the difference gets expensive for the first time. You always pay for a transaction in the coin that the blockchain belongs to, never in the token you are moving. Send LINK from one wallet to another and you pay the fee in ether. Transfer USDT on Tron and you pay in TRX. Send a BEP-20 token and you need BNB.

Many newcomers meet the consequence the first time round: the wallet shows a token balance in the four-figure range, the transfer fails all the same, because not a single unit of the network coin sits in it. The balance is not lost, it is merely immovable until some ether, TRX or BNB arrives.

That gives a rule of thumb for every wallet of your own: put a small reserve of the matching coin next to every token. Which blockchain that is stands in every wallet next to the token itself. The same applies to a hardware wallet, because it too only signs what the blockchain then calculates.

MiCA sorts by function rather than by technical form

For the European supervisor the question of whether something is a coin or a token is secondary. The Regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets, MiCA for short (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114), knows three categories, and none of them is called coin.

E-money tokens keep their value stable against a single official currency, the euro or the dollar for example. Only credit institutions or electronic money institutions may offer such tokens in the EU. Asset-referenced tokens lean on something else: a basket of currencies, a commodity such as gold, or several crypto assets at once; their issuers need prior authorisation. Everything else falls into the residual category of other crypto assets, and that is where utility tokens land along with bitcoin and ether.

The rules for those two stablecoin categories have applied since June 30, 2024, and the licensing requirement for crypto-asset service providers since December 30, 2024. In Germany BaFin runs the supervision; the Crypto Markets Supervision Act regulates competence, procedure and fines alongside it. What that means for providers in Germany is set out at length in our overview of the MiCA obligations.

For investors, that mainly means this: whether a crypto asset may be traded in the EU, and under which conditions, hangs on its function and not on whether it brings a blockchain of its own.

Tax in Germany: one year of holding period for coin and token

The tax office does not draw the distinction either. Coins and tokens count as other assets, and for their sale out of private holdings section 23 of the Income Tax Act applies: a gain is taxable only if no more than a year lies between acquisition and sale. Once that year has run, the gain stays free of tax, whether you sell bitcoin or an ERC-20 token.

An exemption threshold comes on top: gains from private disposal transactions stay free of tax if the total gain in the calendar year sits below 1,000 euros. Once that limit is exceeded, the entire gain is taxable, not merely the part above it. The Federal Ministry of Finance last summarised the details in its circular of March 6, 2025, and tightened the record-keeping obligations in it as well.

One particularity concerns both technical forms equally: every swap counts as a sale. Swap token for token, on a decentralised exchange for instance, and you trigger a disposal transaction, even without a single euro moving. Anyone swapping a great deal cannot manage without clean records; tax software and portfolio trackers take over that bookkeeping.

Wrong blockchain, money gone: the most expensive mistake when sending

Because the same token exists on several blockchains, the withdrawal form of every exchange has two fields: the address and the network. Choose the wrong network and the transfer goes to an address that belongs to nobody there you can reach.

That is particularly treacherous with Ethereum and the BNB Chain, because addresses look identical on both. A withdrawal of USDT over the BNB Chain to an Ethereum address will be executed, and the coins then sit on the BNB Chain at an address whose key you do hold, but whose access your wallet displays only if it knows that network. In the best case the balance is reachable with some effort, in the worst it is permanently lost.

What matters before any withdrawal is first that the network at the exchange matches the one your wallet expects and in which it actually displays the token. A small test amount up front costs one fee and may save the entire balance. The same principle applies to project migrations, for example when a token moves to a blockchain of its own, a process in which the old version of the token is often withdrawn from circulation.

Coin or token: without the coin of the blockchain, the token stays put

The difference between coin and token is technically small and practically large. Technically it turns on whether something has a blockchain of its own. In practice precisely that decides the fee you pay, the network you choose when sending, and how many parties your balance depends on. For supervisors and the tax office, function counts rather than technical form.

1. Settle the technical form before you buy. Does the asset stand on a blockchain of its own or on somebody else's? With a token, the blockchain comes in as a second risk. Trading venues that state both cleanly are in the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Keep a fee reserve next to every token. A small amount of the network coin belongs in every wallet that holds tokens, otherwise the balance stays immovable. Which wallet suits that is shown by the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document every swap. The one-year deadline under section 23 of the Income Tax Act runs separately for each purchase, and every swap starts a new one. Record it as you go and you spare yourself the reconstruction in spring; the tools for it are in the overview of crypto tax software.

(As of October 26, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)