Cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention in the financial world in the past few years as their adoption has increased by investors and institutions. It’s safe to say that cryptocurrencies have reached the mainstream; if you have invested money at some point, you have probably heard of or had a conversation with a neighbor or family member about Bitcoin.

To make matters more challenging, how does one differentiate one cryptocurrency from another? We could be at an inflection point when it comes to evaluating the value and usefulness of cryptocurrencies. Take for example Bitcoin and Ethereum, the world’s two largest digital currencies by market capitalization. Although these assets may appear to act similarly at first glance, they are truly different assets.

Even though both are designed on the blockchain and currently operate under a “proof-of-work” protocol (cryptocurrency miners solve mathematical puzzles to validate transactions on the blockchain), Ethereum may be emerging as the future of cryptocurrency because it offers more technology and use cases than Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was designed as a decentralized payments network that can be used to transfer value between two people anywhere in the world. However, when you compare Bitcoin to Ethereum, the benefit of Ethereum is that it has programmable language on the blockchain. This opens the door for future uses such as smart contracts for decentralized applications, decentralized finance, and a decentralized internet not run by a single authority.

While we do not know as investors which cryptocurrency will be the true winner in the long run, we can make some reasonable assumptions that one could become a much bigger deal.