What is Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. ETC is the native cryptocurrency of the platform now.
Ethereum and ETH
Ethereum is the world's programmable blockchain. It is a technology that lets people send cryptocurrency to anyone for a small fee. It also powers applications that everyone can use and no one can take down. Ethereum builds on Bitcoin's innovation, with some big differences. Both let people use digital money without payment providers or banks. However Ethereum is programmable, so people can also use it for lots of different digital assets. This also means Ethereum is for more than the payment tool. It's a marketplace of financial services, games and apps that can't steal your data or censor you. Which means all financial products or apps which can be used in the real world, can also be implemented on Ethereum with decentralization. ETH is the currency used in it. If people want to run any piece of code on Ethereum, they will use Ether to pay, it is called Gas Fee.
The creation of Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin conceived Ethereum in 2013. Additional founders of Ethereum included Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin. Buterin was intrigued by blockchain technology when he became a co-founder of the Bitcoin Magazine as a 17-year-old programmer in 2011. He started to conceive a platform that went beyond the financial use cases allowed by Bitcoin.Vitalik Buterin said, “I thought those in the Bitcoin community weren’t approaching the problem in the right way. I thought they were going after individual applications; they were trying to kind of explicitly support each use case in a sort of Swiss Army knife protocol. He announced a white paper in 2013, it described what would ultimately become Ethereum using a general scripting language. In 2014, The Co-founders of Ethereum and Buterin launched a crowdsourcing campaign where they sold participants Ether to get their vision off the ground and raised more than $18 million.
Frontier(2015)
The first live release of Ethereum known as Frontier was launched on July 30, 2015. The Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm is used, but it is expected to be converted to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) in the future. The first fork was carried out shortly, it is for adjusting the difficulty of future mining, and it ensured that future users would have an incentive to switch to PoS from PoW. The frontier can only be mined at first, the main function is to give users time to join the ether chain, they can trade and use smart contracts in a few days later.
Homestead(2016)
A second fork took place in the spring of 2016, with the release of the first stable version, called Homestead. The DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization on Ethereum, was hacked in June 2016. That made $50m worth of ether to be moved to a "delegate DAO", that is only controlled by the hacker. Considered options include withdrawing ETH and closing the DAO, but the decentralized nature of the DAO also means that there is no central authority to respond immediately, requiring user consensus. Finally, on July 20, 2016, Ethereum hard fork, making a backwards-incompatible change that brought all ETH (including those that were moved) back to where they were. The original blockchain becomes Ethereum Classic(ETC). People who held ETH would hold both ETH and ETC after forking. The ETH held in exchanges or online wallets is no exception too, most of these online services choose to support only ETH or ETC, let users claim back the other.
Metropolis(2017 ~ 2019)
Metropolis mainly improves the writing of smart contracts, improves security, adds difficulty bombs, and modifies some core architectures to assist in the transition from PoW to PoS in the future. Security upgrades include enabling Ethereum to use zero-knowledge proof zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs, as well as interoperability with the Zcash chain. In terms of usage, smart contracts are used to allow cryptocurrencies on different chains to trade with each other. ERC-20 also became the standard in 2017, with thousands of projects raising funds through it, called an “Initial Coin Offering” (ICO). In 2019, financial commodities became the largest industry on the Ethereum. Samsung phones, the Opera browser, and Microsoft have all developed Ethereum-related programs.
Serenity(2020 ~ Now)
This is the final phase of the project and will move to PoS and develop a second layer scaling solution. The upgrade is currently expected to be divided into three phases, the Beacon Chain required for PoS was updated on December 1, 2020, and allows for PoS, but cannot be withdrawn yet. In 2021, the Beacon chain was upgraded to prepare for the future conversion to PoS, and to control the total circulation by burning ETH and reducing block rewards. It is currently expected to incorporate the original PoW blockchain into the beacon chain in the first half of 2022, and convert it to PoS, and activate 64 shards in the same year to complete the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0.
Price of ETH
ETH is the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap. One week after Frontier released, ETH priced at $0.3 and listed on Kraken. The price of ETH fluctuated around $1 very quickly after being listed on the exchange. Between 2016 to early 2017, the price was up and down between $1 to $10. After that, it started to skyrocket from $10 at the beginning of the year, and it rose to $1,400 at the beginning of 2018. However, in 2018 the price fell to $85 by the end of the year. After that, the price of ETH fluctuated between $100 to $300 till October 2020. Then the price jumped to above $4,300 in May 2021, but the price dropped to $1,700 in 2 months. On November 15, the price reached $4,871 which is the highest point till now. Until the end of June 2022, the price falls back to about $1,100. The story of ETH is keeping going on, it has the greatest potential in cryptocurrencies. The story of ETH keeps going on.
Hope you have a nice trading day!
