“It was almost like you just gave a 21-year-old a million dollars,” Harrison said. “I get it -- they were excited to be so popular.”
Altcoins also sometimes differ in the method of verification used to authenticate transactions. While some altcoins use Proof-of-Work systems, others use Proof-of-Stake consensus, which replaces miners with validators. Proof-Of-Stake mining requires a lot less energy and fewer resources than Proof-Of-Work systems since Proof-Of-Work miners have to do much more ‘work’ to mine blocks.

In Bhambhwani et al. (2019), we challenge the perception that cryptocurrency markets are simply plagued with bubbles and speculative trading by identifying two key blockchain measures that affect cryptocurrency prices. Specifically, theory suggests that the trustworthiness and the transaction benefits of a blockchain are important determinants of cryptocurrency values. Pagnotta and Buraschi (2018) link trustworthiness to the computing power devoted to the blockchain. Biais et al. (2018) link transaction benefits of a cryptocurrency to the size of its network.
The liquidity pool of a crypto exchange is important because it determines what kind of crypto can be exchanged or traded and how much each trade will change the price. The liquidity pool is the total of all of the currency deposited on the exchange by every trader. If this pool is small, then every transaction can have a noticeable effect on the price of the crypto in the exchange. This instability makes it very difficult for a trader to predict how much of each currency they can get at any given time.