Ethereum
Ethereum was proposed in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. Development was crowdfunded in 2014, and the network went live on 30 July 2015, with 72 million coins premined. In 2016, a hacker exploited a flaw in a third-party project called The DAO and stole USD 50 million of Ether. The platform is used for decentralized finance, and has been utilized for many initial coin offerings.
About Ethereum in brief
Ethereum was proposed in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. Development was crowdfunded in 2014, and the network went live on 30 July 2015, with 72 million coins premined. In 2016, a hacker exploited a flaw in a third-party project called The DAO and stole USD 50 million of Ether. As a result, the Ethereum community voted to hard fork the blockchain to reverse the theft. Since the launch, the platform has undergone several planned protocol upgrades, which are affecting the underlying functionality and incentive structures of the platform. The latest upgrade to the platform was implemented on January 1, 2020. In 2019, an employee of the Ethereum Foundation was arrested by the US government for presenting at a blockchain conference in North Korea. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin. The platform is used for decentralized finance, and has been utilized for many initial coin offerings. It has an unusually long list of founders, with more than a dozen people involved in the development of the software. It was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, in January 2014, with the participants buying the Ethereum value token with another digital currency, Bitcoin. In June 2016, the project raised a record $150 million in a crowdsale to fund a decentralized organization called TheDAO, which set a record for a smart contract set on the platform, in June 2016. The project was founded in December 2013 by Vitalik buterin, Myself, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, & Amir Chetrit.
Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, & Jeffrey Wilcke were added in early 2014 as founders. In January 2015, the team released a beta pre-release of the tentative release of the experimental platform, marked Frontier. In July 2016, The Olympic network provided users with 25,000 Ether to stress testing the limits of the Ether network. The team also released a public beta release of their proof of concept for the Olympic network, marked Olympic 1.0. It can execute Turing-complete scripts and run decentralized applications. It’s the most actively used blockchain, and is used to run smart contracts and other decentralized applications, such as stock and property trading. It also allows for the creation of smart contracts that can be tied to real-world assets, like stocks and property, to be stored on the blockchain. The network has been used to launch many ICOs, including the recent DAO token offering, which raised more than $100 million in just a few days. There are plans to make the platform available to the general public for the first time in the near future. It will also be used to create smart contracts for financial services such as insurance, mortgages, and other forms of financial services. The system is designed to be the underlying and imperceptible medium for the applications running on top of it. The name ‘ether’ comes from the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel. It comes from a list of elements from science fiction.
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This page is based on the article Ethereum published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 11, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
