Please don't call it an altcoin. It's not a Bitcoin clone.
Bitshares is a blockchain, a decentralized exchange, a backbone for businesses.
Bitshares is the longest blockchain in existence. over 20,000,000 blocks by now.
Bithsares together with Steem are the cryptocurrencies with fastest block times. Transactions are included in a block in about 1.5s.
Bitshares has the world record of transactions in a single day, almost 1,000,000 tx.
Bitshares is the most scalable blockchain. While Bitcoin can do some 5TX/s, Bitshares can probably do over 100,000.
Bitshares has price-stable currencies backed by something real in a smart contract. BitUSD, bitCNY, bitEUR, bitJPY, bitGOLD, bitSILVER.
Really flexible permission system, with M of N multisig, nested multisig, etc.
Very low transaction and trading fee's. Like fractions of a cent.
Named accounts instead of public keys. Curiously people find it hard to understand.
Development fund / treasury, which can be used to pay for workers. Workers can code, do marketing, or provide anything of value which shareholders vote for.
Direct or proxy-voting by shareholders for witnesses, committee, workers.
Committee adjustable blockchain parameters, like block time, block size, fee's, amount of witnesses, and probably a hundred or more parameters.
User issued assets, like gateway IOU's
Fee backed assets; someone can develop a feature for Bitshares, the usage of which requires a fee, which is payed to buy back the FBA. Anyone can create a new feature, crowdfund it, and personally benefit from it's usage.
Smartcoins, the value of which is defined by an algorithm. HERO is one, and it's value increases by 5% per year. BIT20 is another, which follows the value of top20 crypto's.
Commodity assets, which follow the value of any given thing with a real-world value, like wheat, oil, temperature, etc...
Binary prediction markets.
Decentralized multi-party oracles
Inbuilt referral system, so the referrer of a new user gets a slice of all fee's payed by the new user infinitely
Whitelists and Blacklists
Lots of adjustable parameters for asset issuer.
That's some of the features. Join the telegram/Discord group for more, or watch some youtube videos.