These are the simplest coins. They’re programmable money. They’re looking to become a medium of exchange for goods and services. Either that or they’re a store of value like gold or silver. Some are deflationary, some inflationary. Some are meant to move fast and others are meant to hold so you can buy things with it later.

The granddaddy of them all is Bitcoin.

Platform coins are looking to do things that are the sole domain of servers and clouds right now. They want to power decentralized applications, run smart contracts as law and power everything from identities to storage to voting.

The platforms have the longest way to go. They have to solve incredibly challenging scaling problems, maintain security, create whole new programming languages and deliver a fantastic user experience.

These platforms are the foundation of the decentralized internet of the future.

The problem with most utility coins is they have no utility.

You’re supposed to use these coins to consume services like identity lookups or decentralized DNS lookups but there is no platform to use these coins yet, so they’re some of the riskiest because they have to survive long enough to service the dominant platforms. By the time that happens those services might already be incorporated into the platforms or get up and running for free. This should be the smallest portion of your bag. Expect utility coins to make up a significant portion of the post dot-com crypto bubble burst list.