Ethereum is a decentralized open-source blockchain system that features its own cryptocurrency, Ether. ETH works as a platform for numerous other cryptocurrencies, as well as for the execution of 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 crowd sale in the summer of 2014. The project team managed to raise $18.3 million in Bitcoin, and Ethereum’s price in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) was $0.311, with over 60 million Ether sold. Taking Ethereum’s price now, this puts the return on investment (ROI) at an annualized rate 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 the prototype codenamed “Frontier.” Since then, there has been several network updates — “Constantinople” on Feb. 28, 2019, “Istanbul” on Dec. 8, 2019, “Muir Glacier” on Jan. 2, 2020, “Berlin” on April 14, 2021, and most recently on Aug. 5, 2021, the “London” hard fork.Ethereum’s own purported goal is to become a global platform for decentralized applications, allowing users from all over the world to write and run software that is resistant to censorship, downtime and fraud.

Ethereum has a total of eight co-founders — an unusually large number for a crypto project. They first met on June 7, 2014, in Zug, Switzerland.

• Russian-Canadian Vitalik Buterin is perhaps the best known of the bunch. He authored the original white paper that first described Ethereum in 2013 and still works on improving the platform to this day. Prior to ETH, Buterin co-founded and wrote for the Bitcoin Magazine news website.British programmer Gavin Wood is arguably the second most important co-founder of ETH, as he coded the first technical implementation of Ethereum in the C++ programming language, proposed Ethereum’s native programming language Solidity and was the first chief technology officer of the Ethereum Foundation. Before Ethereum, Wood was a research scientist at Microsoft. Afterward, he moved on to establish the Web3 Foundation.Among the other co-founders of Ethereum are: - Anthony Di Iorio, who underwrote the project during its early stage of development. - Charles Hoskinson, who played the principal role in establishing the Swiss-based Ethereum Foundation and its legal framework. - Mihai Alisie, who provided assistance in establishing the Ethereum Foundation. - Joseph Lubin, a Canadian entrepreneur, who, like Di Iorio, has helped fund Ethereum during its early days, and later founded an incubator for startups based on ETH called ConsenSys. - Amir Chetrit, who helped co-found Ethereum but stepped away from it early into the development.