What is Ethereum (ETH)?

Ethereum is a decentralized open source blockchain system that includes its own cryptocurrency, Ether. ETH acts as a platform for a number of other cryptocurrencies as well as for implementing decentralized smart contracts.

Ethereum was first described in a 2013 whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin. Buterin, along with other co-founders, secured funding for the project in an online public crowdsale in the summer of 2014. The project team managed to raise $18.3 million in bitcoins, and the price of Ethereum in the initial coin offering (ICO) was $0.311, with more than 60 million ethers sold . If we take the price of Ethereum now, that gives a return on investment (ROI) on an annual basis of over 270%, essentially almost quadrupling your investment every year since the summer of 2014.

The Ethereum Foundation officially launched the blockchain on July 30, 2015 under a prototype codenamed "Frontier". Since then, there have been several network updates — "Constantinople" on February 28, 2019, "Istanbul" on December 8, 2019, "Muir Glacier" on January 2, 2020, "Berlin" on April 14, 2021, and most recently on the August 5, 2021 hard fork " London".

What makes Ethereum unique?

Ethereum pioneered the concept of a blockchain platform for smart contracts. Smart contracts are computer programs that automatically perform the actions necessary to fulfill an agreement between several parties on the Internet. They were designed to reduce the need for trusted intermediaries between suppliers, thereby reducing transaction costs while increasing the reliability of transactions.

Ethereum's main innovation was designing a platform that allowed it to execute smart contracts using the blockchain, which further enhances the already existing advantages of smart contract technology. Ethereum's blockchain, according to co-founder Gavin Wood, was designed as a kind of "one computer for the entire planet," theoretically capable of making any program more robust, censorship-resistant, and less prone to fraud by running it on a globally distributed network of public nodes.

In addition to smart contracts, the Ethereum blockchain is able to host other cryptocurrencies, called "tokens", using its ERC-20 compatibility standard. In fact, it has been the most common use of the ETH platform to date: more than 280,000 ERC-20 compliant tokens have been launched to date. More than 40 of them are among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, such as USDT, LINK and BNB. Since the inception of Play2Earn games, there has been a substantial increase in interest in the price of ETH to PHP.

burned over $1 billion worth of ether.


Ethereum 2.0:

In 2022, Ethereum plans to move to proof-of-stake with the Ethereum 2.0 update. This switch has been part of Ethereum's plan since the network's inception and should see a new consensus mechanism as well as the introduction of sharding as a scaling solution. The current Ethereum chain will become the Beacon Chain and serve as a settlement layer for smart contract interactions on other chains.

At the end of 2021, Ethereum's Arrow Glacier update was postponed until June 2022. Until then, Vitalik Buterin expects the path to the end of the network to be shaped by optimistic summaries and summaries of Ex.

In January 2022, the Ethereum Foundation announced the decision to remove the "Ethereum 2.0" terminology to "save all future users from navigating this confusing mental model". He further explained that the previously mentioned terms "Ethereum 1.0" will be labeled "execution layer" while "Ethereum 2.0" will be called "consensus layer". This is ultimately intended to provide a more accurate version of Ethereum's roadmap.