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What a cryptocurrency is and why there are so many
The official definition is less mystical than it sounds. For European supervisors, a crypto-asset is “a digital representation of a value or of a right that is able to be transferred and stored electronically,” using distributed ledger technology or something similar. In plain words: an entry in an accounting book shared by thousands of computers that nobody can rewrite at will. That book is usually a blockchain.
Chapters (6)
Understanding what a cryptocurrency is isn't the hard part. The problem is that creating one costs very little: anyone can launch a token in an afternoon on Ethereum or Solana, give it a funny name and a website full of promises. That's why, in the description of my video on the five best for 2026, I put it this bluntly:
“There are more than 20,000 cryptocurrencies and 95% of them will disappear.”
Before going any further, a distinction that will save you trouble. A coin is native to its own network and pays for its fees: BTC on Bitcoin, ETH on Ethereum, SOL on Solana. A token lives on top of someone else's network: Shiba Inu is an Ethereum token, Render has run on Solana since 2023 and Tether (USDT) circulates on several networks at once. Day to day, everything gets called a cryptocurrency, but the difference matters, because a token inherits the fees and the failures of the network that hosts it.
The cards above are my Entiende Cripto series: one coin per episode, covering what it is, what it's for and what can go wrong. As of October 2026 there are 22 episodes. This page is the map so you don't get lost among them; the detail on each coin is in its episode and in the full list of episodes.
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Five questions to evaluate any cryptocurrency
Before I look at a single chart, I ask any project these five questions. They don't guarantee anything, but in one afternoon they clear away a lot of hype. They work just as well for Bitcoin as for the memecoin your brother-in-law recommended at Christmas dinner.
- 01
Utility: what problem it solves and who pays for it
Explain it in one sentence. Then look for someone who pays to use it without waiting for the token to go up: real fees, customers with names, usage that holds up when the price falls. My control question is this one: if the token disappeared tomorrow, would the business keep working? If the answer is yes, the token is decoration.
- 02
Supply and inflation: how many there will be and who gets them
Bitcoin has a maximum of 21 million, fixed from day one. Ethereum has no cap: according to ethereum.org it issues about 1,700 ETH a day to validators and has burned part of the fees since 2021, so its supply rises or falls with usage. Dogecoin adds about 5 billion new coins a year, with no limit. Also compare the current market cap with the fully diluted one and check the unlock schedule: if only a small part of the total is circulating today, someone will sell the rest.
- 03
Control: who can change the rules
On Bitcoin nobody decides alone. BNB Smart Chain runs with 45 validators, according to its documentation, and on TRON blocks are produced by 27 “super representatives” chosen by vote; Hedera is governed by a council of large companies. The fewer the hands, the faster the network decides and the more you have to trust those hands. Also look at who kept the coins at launch: of the 100 billion XRP that were created, 80 billion went to the company that is now Ripple.
- 04
Liquidity: could you sell tomorrow without sinking the price?
Check how many authorized platforms list it and how much volume it really trades. European supervisors warn about it in writing: you may not be able to sell at the price or at the moment you want. With small coins, one large sale moves the price against you.
- 05
Regulatory risk: it could be left off your exchange
In the European Union the MiCA regulation sets the rules, and it can leave a coin with no legal place to buy it. That's happening to unauthorized stablecoins such as USDT, and it will happen to privacy coins in 2027 (I explain it further down). If you live in Spain or elsewhere in the EU, check that the platform is authorized before you buy: I go through it step by step in my guide to the MiCA rules.
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Types of cryptocurrency: the map by family
European law only has three drawers: e-money tokens (stablecoins tied to an official currency, like the euro or the dollar), asset-referenced tokens (tied to something else or to a basket of things) and everything else, which is where Bitcoin, Ethereum and almost everything you'll see on an exchange ends up. That classification tells you what protection you have, but it says nothing about what each coin is for. That's why I sort them by what they do. The table is the summary; below it I go family by family.
The borders are blurry. Solana is a smart contract platform and also home to a huge number of memecoins; Ethereum is the base that a good part of the tokens in this table live on. Use it as a compass, not as revealed truth.
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Bitcoin, the platforms and the layer 2s
Bitcoin focuses on a single thing: being scarce money that nobody controls. It was born with a nine-page paper published in 2008, the network started on January 3, 2009 and its issuance is written into the code: there will be at most 21 million, and the miners' reward is cut in half every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years. The last halving was in April 2024 (from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC per block), and since March 2026 more than 20 million have been issued. I take you through it calmly in my Bitcoin profile and in the guide to cycles and halving.
Now the nuance almost nobody puts next to “store of value”: in the short term it isn't stable. From its all-time high of $126,272, set on October 6, 2025, it fell to $57,735 on July 1, 2026, a drop of more than 54% according to Bitstamp's daily candles. For someone thinking in years it can be a store of value; for someone who checks their balance every morning, it's a roller coaster.
Smart contract platforms are shared computers: networks where anyone can deploy programs that move money according to rules written in code. Ethereum led the way in 2015 and moved to proof of stake in 2022. Solana bets on speed and paid dearly for it: after FTX collapsed in November 2022, SOL fell as much as 40% in a single day. Cardano prides itself on an academic approach, and since January 2025 ADA holders have voted on changes on-chain. Avalanche reaches consensus through repeated votes among small samples of validators.
With two others, it pays to look closely at who's behind them. BNB was born to pay fees on Binance, the exchange that didn't get a MiCA license and that since July 1, 2026 can't provide regulated services to residents of Spain. TRON, founded by Justin Sun, moves more than $80 billion in stablecoins, as I explain in its episode, with only 27 block producers. I'm not saying they're bad bets; I'm saying that with them, the control risk weighs as much as the technology.
Layer 2s process transactions off Ethereum and leave it only the summary, so everything comes out cheaper. Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup that opened to the public in August 2021. Polygon started in 2017 as Matic, an Ethereum-compatible network that records checkpoints on it, and in 2024 it swapped MATIC for POL one to one. Both illustrate the most uncomfortable question in this family: a network can do very well while its token does very badly. When I published their episodes, POL was 95% below its highs and ARB more than 90% below.
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Oracles, tokenization and payments: the crypto you don't see
These two families aren't competing to be the next Ethereum. They're plumbing: they bring data, payments or traditional assets to the blockchain, which is why banks show up so often in their episodes. Chainlink solves the oracle problem, because a smart contract can't see a price or an interest rate from outside its network on its own. Quant sells interoperability: its technology, Overledger, aims to connect different blockchains with each other and with banks' systems.
Chainlink is the best example of why you have to read the fine print. On August 10, 2026, Standard Chartered published a note with LINK targets of $13 for the end of 2026 and $200 for the end of 2030, when it was trading at around $8: that's where the famous x25 comes from. The bank itself lists the risks (slower tokenization than expected, competition and technical failures), and it's the same bank that in December 2025 cut its bitcoin target for that year in half. A price target is a scenario with assumptions, not a promise.
Chapters (5)
In tokenization and payments, Ondo offers products backed mainly by US government debt, plus tokenized stocks; Stellar and XRP were born as payment networks, and Hedera is governed by a council that includes companies such as Google and IBM. The question I ask all of them is the same: does the business belong to the company or to the token? The ONDO token, for example, is used to vote in Ondo DAO; the tokenized bonds are a different product. The company growing doesn't force the token to go up.
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AI, stablecoins, privacy and memecoins: where the fine print runs longest
Artificial intelligence is the trendy label, and that's exactly what makes it dangerous. In my video on the best AI cryptos I sum it up like this: more than 900 coins are sold as “artificial intelligence” and 95% of them are worthless. The two I cover in the series do have a product. Bittensor organizes subnets that compete to produce services such as compute or inference, with a maximum of 21 million TAO; Render connects people who have idle graphics cards with people who need computing power. Even so, the question still stands: who pays for that service once the headlines run out.
Chapters (7)
Stablecoins try to always be worth the same as an official currency, almost always the dollar. Tether (USDT) is the most used and the most controversial: in 2021 the US CFTC fined it $41 million because, according to the regulator, it only had sufficient reserves on 27.6% of the days in a 26-month sample between 2016 and 2018. In Europe it has a more immediate problem: it doesn't appear in ESMA's register of issuers (checked on October 17, 2026), and on October 8 ESMA asked national supervisors to make authorized exchanges stop providing services with stablecoins that don't comply with MiCA and wind down what's left within three months at most. If you live in Spain or elsewhere in the EU, you'll be able to sell, convert or withdraw, but not buy more. European supervisors say it plainly: stablecoins may not be as stable as they look, especially when the market is under stress.
Privacy coins hide who pays, who gets paid and how much. Monero is the main one, and Europe is closing the door on it: OKX and Binance delisted it in early 2024, and Kraken removed it in the European Economic Area that same year. The final blow comes on July 10, 2027, when the EU anti-money-laundering regulation (Regulation (EU) 2024/1624) starts to apply: it bans crypto-asset service providers from keeping accounts that allow their holders or their transactions to be anonymized, including through anonymity-enhancing coins. That rule doesn't ban holding it in your own wallet, but buying or selling it on a regulated platform will get harder and harder. And as I point out in the description of its episode, privacy doesn't mean avoiding taxes: if you live in Spain and sell at a profit, you pay tax just as you would on any other crypto.
Memecoins are, in the European supervisors' definition, crypto-assets named after trends or humorous themes that are created to build a community. Dogecoin was born as a joke in December 2013 and has no issuance cap; Shiba Inu appeared in 2020, launched by an anonymous creator, with a supply of almost a quadrillion tokens. Their price depends almost entirely on attention. If you get in, do it with money you can afford to lose completely.
And a special case: Hyperliquid, a blockchain of its own with a perpetual futures exchange that runs entirely on-chain and that, according to its documentation, was funded without venture capital. The project is serious, but the product it moves, leverage, is exactly the one that wipes out accounts in minutes. Being decentralized doesn't make it any less dangerous. I'm not going to push you to trade futures here; if you want to understand why, read the guide to risk management.
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My rankings: the best, the worst and the AI picks
When someone asks me what to buy, I send them to these videos on one condition: that they look at the criteria first and the names second. In the overall top 5, I look for fundamentals, institutional backing and technology, and at the end I add an extra crypto that I myself flag as high risk. The fact that I label it that way already tells you how to take the list.
Chapters (8)
The other two complement each other. In the one on the three best altcoins, I deliberately leave out the biggest names and look for mid-cap projects that already have something real working. All three picks have their own Entiende Cripto episode: Chainlink, Ondo and Bittensor. In the one on the three worst, I do the opposite: altcoins with scam signals, dangerous tokenomics and extreme risk. It's the best way to train your eye, because the names change but the patterns repeat.
The three best altcoins and the three worst of 2026
Las 3 MEJORES Altcoins para 2026 (analicé más de 20)
· 755 views
Las 3 Peores Criptomonedas de 2026 | No Inviertas Aquí
· 639 views
You'll find all the rankings together, including the one on the crypto that a bank says could multiply by 25, in the best and worst cryptos category.
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Red flags: when I run
Being in the top 10 protects you from nothing. Terra (LUNA) was one of the ten largest cryptocurrencies until May 2022: its stablecoin lost its peg to the dollar and in one week almost $45 billion of market cap vanished. These are the signs that, when I see them together, make me close the tab:
- Guaranteed returns or sky-high fixed interest for “staking.” Risk and return always go together.
- Urgency: presales that end today, countdowns, bonuses for getting in right now.
- Supply in a few hands, with big unlocks for the team and the early investors on the horizon.
- Partnerships that are really pilots: a bank's logo on the website doesn't mean the bank uses the token.
- An invisible team on a small project. Satoshi's anonymity worked for Bitcoin; in a new coin it multiplies the risk.
- A white paper with price promises. In the EU, MiCA prohibits the white paper from making claims about the crypto-asset's future value.
- Listed only on unknown platforms or on ones without a MiCA license.
- Promotion by private message or by influencers who don't say whether they're paid to talk about it.
- Anyone who asks for your seed phrase. Nobody legitimate ever needs it.
For the murkier side, with the specific scams going around right now, see the guide to crypto scams and how to avoid them.
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Where to buy crypto in Spain without gambling with your money
If you live in Spain, since July 1, 2026 only providers authorized by the CNMV or by another European supervisor with a passport to operate in Spain can serve you; if you live elsewhere in the EU, the same MiCA logic applies, so check that the provider is authorized for your country in the ESMA register. As of October 17, 2026, the ESMA and CNMV registers show ten exchanges with a MiCA license, a passport for Spain and real activity: OKX, Bit2Me, Kraken, Coinbase, Bybit EU, Crypto.com, Bitpanda, Revolut, eToro and Bitvavo. Binance and Bitget don't have a MiCA license, so I don't recommend them for Spain. The full comparison is in the MiCA-licensed exchanges section.
The exchange I use is OKX: it holds a MiCA license from Malta's MFSA, has been able to operate in Spain since November 27, 2025 and doesn't charge for euro deposits via SEPA (checked on October 17, 2026). It also has a dark side you should know about: in February 2025 it pleaded guilty in the United States to operating as an unlicensed money transmitter and agreed to pay more than $504 million, and in April 2025 Malta's anti-money-laundering supervisor fined its European subsidiary about €1.1 million. Right below this text you'll find the box with my link: it's an affiliate link, so if you open an account through it I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I lay it all out, pros and cons, in my OKX review.
- 01
Buy on an authorized platform
Check the license in the ESMA or CNMV register before you deposit a single euro. The step-by-step for your first purchase is in how to buy bitcoin, and it works the same way for any other coin.
- 02
Decide where you'll keep it
For small amounts and frequent use, the exchange or a hot wallet; for what you don't plan to touch for years, a hardware wallet bought from the official store. I explain it in the security section.
- 03
Log every trade for the tax office
If you live in Spain, swapping one crypto for another is also taxable, not just selling for euros. Keep a record from day one; the guide to crypto taxes in Spain explains how.
If this map has helped you, the next step is simple: pick a family that interests you, play its episode from the cards above and watch the whole thing, starting with the risks chapter. And if you want me to analyze a coin that isn't in the series yet, ask for it in the comments on the channel.