Ethereum is bitcoin's younger cousin with the goal of being more advanced and more functioning than BTC. The majority of Ethereum is made up of ETH. ETH is the one currency that most people are talking about when they say they are buying ethereum. Ethereum is the 2nd largest crypto currency with a market cap of $157,131,784,959 currently although prices change quick, Ethereum has a lot of functionality such as NFTs, crypto real estate and internet wallets to name a few.
Ethereum was first described in the ethereum white papers by Vitalik Buterin a programmer, that explained a way to build decentralized applications. He argued to the Bitcoin developers that blockchain technology could benefit from other applications besides money. He also argued for blockchain technology needing a more robust language that could lead to real-world assets like property and stocks to the blockchain.
In 2013 Vitalik failed on reaching an agreement on how one of his projects should proceed, he proposed a new platform with a more robust scripting language, a programming language that eventually became Ethereum. Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, During the conference the Ethereum founders rented a house in Miami one of the founders invited a friend that invited reporter Morgan Peck, Peck later wrote about the experience in Wired. About 6 months later the founders once again met in Switzerland where Vitalik told the rest of the founders that the project will go forward as non-profit causing one of the founders to leave.
Development of Ethereum began in 2014 trough a swiss company, the idea of putting smart contracts in the blockchain needed to be specified to be implemented in the software. The person responsible for this was the chief technology officer Gavin Wood. subsequently the Ethereum Foundation was founded, development was funded by an online crowd from July to August 2014 where people bought the Ethereum token (ether) with another digital currency. While there was a lot of praise for Ethereum, there was also a lot of skepticism around its security.
Since the launch of Ethereum, the platform has had a number of planned protocol upgrades. In 2016 a decentralized autonomous organization called The DAO a set of smart contracts developed on the platform which raised a total of $150 million in a crowd sale to fund the project. The DAO was hacked in 2016 where a total of $50 million of DAO tokens were stolen by the hacker. This event caused the Ethereum network to split into two different blockchains: Ethereum with the theft reversed, and Ethereum Classic which was continued on the original chain.
In March 2017 some blockchain startups and some Fortune 500 companies announced the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance with 30 founding members. By July 2017 there were over 150 members of the alliance. By early 2018 ether was the 2nd largest cryptocurrency only behind Bitcoin. In 2019 one of the Ethereum Foundation emplyees was arrested by the US government for presenting at conference in North Korea. In March 2021, the financial service giant Visa announced its beginning of settling stablecoin transactions using Ehtereum, in april 2021 other financial services giants like JP Morgan Chase, UBS and MasterCard announced they were investing a total of $65 million into a software development firm that builds Ethereum related infrastructure. There were two network upgrades during 2021, the first was "Berlin" and the second was "London". The London upgrade included a mechanism for reducing transaction fee volatility. On the 27th of August 2021, the blockchain experienced a brief change in protocol that was the result of clients using different non-compatible software versions.
