Following the birth of Litecoin and other Bitcoin alternatives, MonaCoin entered the market. Focused on becoming the most widely-used cryptocurrency in Japan, MonaCoin added enhanced features to Litecoin's codebase to try to create a superior option.
In the early 2010s, when the blockchain space was dominated mostly by cyberpunks, anonymity and privacy were huge concerns. This led to the development of Zcash in 2016, one of the first privacy-enabling cryptocurrencies.