Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality, second only to bitcoin in market capitalization.
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software.
Quick Facts
- Founder
- Vitalik Buterin
- Co-founders
- Gavin Wood
- Charles Hoskinson
- Anthony Di Iorio
- Joseph Lubin
- Native cryptocurrency
- Ether (ETH)
- Consensus mechanism
- Proof-of-Stake (post-Merge upgrade)
- Original consensus mechanism
- Proof-of-Work
Lore & Background
Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. Other founders include Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin. In 2014, development work began and was crowdfunded, and the network went live on 30 July 2015. Ethereum allows anyone to deploy decentralized applications onto it, which anyone can then use. Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications provide financial instruments that do not directly rely on financial intermediaries like brokerages, exchanges, or banks. This facilitates borrowing against cryptocurrency holdings or lending them out for interest. Ethereum allows users to create fungible (e.g. ERC-20) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a variety of properties, and to create smart contracts that can receive, hold and send those assets in accordance with the contract's immutable code and a transaction's input data. On 15 September 2022, Ethereum transitioned its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) in an update known as "The Merge", which cut the blockchain's energy usage by over 99%.
Reader's Guide
Ethereum was initially described in late 2013 in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, in January 2014. Formal development began in early 2014 through a Swiss company, Ethereum Switzerland GmbH. The Ethereum Yellow Paper specified the Ethereum Virtual Machine. A Swiss non-profit foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, was founded. Development was funded by an online public crowd sale from July to August 2014. The network went live on 30 July 2015 with the "Frontier" release. In 2016, The DAO was exploited, leading to a hard fork that split the network into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. In March 2017, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was announced. In 2017, CryptoKitties launched on Ethereum. In January 2018, the ERC-721 Non-Fungible Token Standard was published. On 15 September 2022, The Merge transitioned Ethereum to proof-of-stake.
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