What is Ethereum (ETH)?
Ethereum (ETH) is an open-source, Proof-of-Stake blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring a smart contract (scripting) functionality. The cryptocurrency provided by Ethereum is known as Ether and it is transferred from one account to another to compensate participant nodes for performed computations. In stark contrast to Bitcoin, Litecoin and other forms of cryptocurrency, Ethereum is used mainly as a computing platform and not as a payment system.
It gives users an opportunity to build and deploy decentralized apps and therefore make use of the processing power.
Ethereum is also used as a platform for launching different cryptocurrencies. The ERC20 token is defined as a standard by the Ethereum Foundation. Developers of other currencies are able to use the token as a template to earn money with an ICO.
Ethereum’s Price Chart & Historical Ethereum Prices
Ethereum was launched on 30th July 2015, and soon the first transactions followed. It took just a month for Ether coins to start being sold for 1 to 3 USD. By August that year, the price had set firmly at $1, which stayed that way until the New year. Then, from January 2016 onwards, the price increased steadily, with Ether coins being sold in June for as much as $18.
Around that time the project named DAO was being crowdfunded through Ether. The ICO was drawn to a halt, as later in June there was an exploit discovered that allowed a hacker to take millions of Ether from the amount achieved by the crowdfunding for DAO.
The value of Ether took a slump then and stayed at approximately $11 until March of the following year, then the $18 threshold was passed. One of the major reasons for this was the conflict in the community that erupted between members who considered that the protocol should be changed and those who thought it should remain the same.
How to Buy Ethereum
Buy Ethereum P2P
The easiest and quickest way to buy Ethereum is directly from someone who already owns it. You can ask a person who owns ETH to transfer it to the address of your wallet and then pay him the money back, either in person, by bank transfer or using PayPal. The downside of this method is that it requires that there is a level of trust between two parties. This means it’s not always easy to go through with if you are buying for the first time.
Ethereum Service
As a way of making it easier and less stressful, there are many established and reputable services that sell cryptocurrencies, including the aforementioned Ether, for the fiat currency of your choice. By doing it this way, you will send the compensation to them first, based on their reputation, and they will then credit the appropriate address with the correct amount of ether.
Exchange Cryptocurrency
Another great way you can obtain Ethereum is by exchanging another cryptocurrency you already own for it. To do this, you need to use an online cryptocurrency exchange.
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.