Bitcoin (BTC)
AssetsIn short The first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009. Fixed supply of 21 million, often described as "digital gold" and used as the market's benchmark asset.
New coins enter circulation as a reward to miners, and that reward halves roughly every four years — the supply schedule is written into the software, not decided by anyone. Bitcoin deliberately does little besides move value: it has no general-purpose contracts, which keeps the system simple and hard to break. Because it is the oldest and deepest market, the rest of the sector tends to move with it, so its chart is read as the sector's weather report.