Should you buy Ethereum?
But before you make any decisions, you should watch this excellent presentation from a cryptocurrency expert Dirk de Bruin.
Focus on Ethereum (ETH), this Bitcoin challenger: what are the characteristics of this cryptocurrency? What are the differences and similarities with Bitcoin? What is the Ethereum price for the day? How to invest in Ethereum and when? With what strategy and via which platforms?
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BITCOIN, TOKEN, STABLE COIN… HOW TO BUILD A DIVERSIFIED CRYPTO PORTFOLIO?
CRYPTO CURRENCY: 7 Coins/ Virtual Currencies To Follow In 2021
Experts are almost unanimous on one fact: crypto-currencies today represent a financial advance and a technological feat that is gradually penetrating the habits of individuals on an international scale.
The economic impact becomes real: at the start of 2021, cryptocurrencies have a capitalization that represents nearly 1.1% of world GDP for 1.25% to 1.35% of the world population. Currency, its issuance and its control which, for a long time, were the preserve of States, now takes into account a system of decentralization. Today, many people are starting to wonder if they should invest and buy cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. It is now undeniable that we are at the dawn of a new era, a new way of conceiving and conducting commercial transactions between individuals.
Notwithstanding the usefulness of this new technology as a means of payment, crypto-currencies have also attracted individuals by their profitability. So they made it an investment in its own right. In fact, these are financial assets which, for many of them, show dizzying growth curves. A growth such that the majority of specialists agree that cryptocurrencies are one of the most profitable investments of the last ten years if we accept the high volatility and the risk-taking.
In 2017, Bitcoin, which was already worth around $ 1,000 at the start of the year, saw its price multiplied by 20. A success such that it almost overshadowed that of other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Ripple , Litecoin , NEO and others. And yet, despite its sky-high price, bitcoin is not the cryptocurrency that has performed the best.
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Ethereum shows more interesting annual average performance than other major cryptocurrencies. Be careful however, volatility and risk are the corollary of such returns.
In early 2020, Ethereum was worth $ 150. Since then, its price has been multiplied by more than 10! This success is such that it has almost overshadowed that of other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ripple, Litecoin, NEO and others.
In addition, although bitcoin is the precursor of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, it suffers from certain shortcomings and imperfections on which cryptocurrency projects like Ethereum have been based to propose, technically speaking, more successful projects and innovative.
Launched on July 30, 2015, Ethereum is a decentralized exchange protocol which, via a Turing-complete language, allows users to set up smart contracts. They are in fact pre-established contracts, applications that self-run exactly as expected with no possibility of downtime, censorship, or fraud, and without the intervention of a third party to ensure it. authenticity. For example, thanks to Ethereum you can establish a future contract whereby you decide to buy something only when certain conditions are met. Normally, this type of contract requires the involvement of a notary or a trusted third party who will ultimately ensure that each party respects its commitments. It goes without saying that such contracts involve high costs. These applications offered by Ethereum are based on a computer protocol that allows the verification as well as the implementation of a mutual contract between the parties. They are deployed using the blockchain, and anyone who wishes can consult them.
This allows developers to create markets, store records of debts or pledges, transfer funds according to past instructions (like a will or futures contract), or for example acquire many other things that have not yet been invented, regardless of all the risks involved in the intervention of a third party.
Focus on Ethereum (ETH), this Bitcoin challenger: what are the characteristics of this cryptocurrency? What are the differences and similarities with Bitcoin? What is the Ethereum price for the day? How to invest in Ethereum and when? With what strategy and via which platforms?
Experts are almost unanimous on one fact: crypto-currencies today represent a financial advance and a technological feat that is gradually penetrating the habits of individuals on an international scale.
The economic impact becomes real: at the start of 2021, cryptocurrencies have a capitalization that represents nearly 1.1% of world GDP for 1.25% to 1.35% of the world population. Currency, its issuance and its control which, for a long time, were the preserve of States, now takes into account a system of decentralization. Today, many people are starting to wonder if they should invest and buy cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. It is now undeniable that we are at the dawn of a new era, a new way of conceiving and conducting commercial transactions between individuals.
Notwithstanding the usefulness of this new technology as a means of payment, crypto-currencies have also attracted individuals by their profitability. So they made it an investment in its own right. In fact, these are financial assets which, for many of them, show dizzying growth curves. A growth such that the majority of specialists agree that cryptocurrencies are one of the most profitable investments of the last ten years if we accept the high volatility and the risk-taking.
Also discover our complete fileBitcoin and virtual currency: how to invest in cryptocurrency
In 2017, Bitcoin, which was already worth around $ 1,000 at the start of the year, saw its price multiplied by 20. A success such that it almost overshadowed that of other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Ripple , Litecoin , NEO and others. And yet, despite its sky-high price, bitcoin is not the cryptocurrency that has performed the best.
Ethereum shows more interesting annual average performance than other major cryptocurrencies. Be careful however, volatility and risk are the corollary of such returns.
In early 2020, Ethereum was worth $ 150. Since then, its price has been multiplied by more than 10! This success is such that it has almost overshadowed that of other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ripple, Litecoin, NEO and others.
In addition, although bitcoin is the precursor of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, it suffers from certain shortcomings and imperfections on which cryptocurrency projects like Ethereum have been based to propose, technically speaking, more successful projects and innovative.
Discover our articles:
Launched on July 30, 2015, Ethereum is a decentralized exchange protocol which, via a Turing-complete language, allows users to set up smart contracts. They are in fact pre-established contracts, applications that self-run exactly as expected with no possibility of downtime, censorship, or fraud, and without the intervention of a third party to ensure it. authenticity. For example, thanks to Ethereum you can establish a future contract whereby you decide to buy something only when certain conditions are met. Normally, this type of contract requires the involvement of a notary or a trusted third party who will ultimately ensure that each party respects its commitments. It goes without saying that such contracts involve high costs. These applications offered by Ethereum are based on a computer protocol that allows the verification as well as the implementation of a mutual contract between the parties. They are deployed using the blockchain, and anyone who wishes can consult them.
This allows developers to create markets, store records of debts or pledges, transfer funds according to past instructions (like a will or futures contract), or for example acquire many other things that have not yet been invented, regardless of all the risks involved in the intervention of a third party.
Also discover our
Ether is the native cryptographic currency that the Ethereum network uses as a means of settling its smart contracts. Just behind Bitcoin, Ethereum is the second most important cryptocurrency on the market with a market capitalization of over $ 150 billion in early 2021.
The Ethereum network is at the heart of many projects and allows the development of applications.
One of the most mind-boggling and intriguing projects is the mysterious 335 km² real estate acquisition in Nevada between Google and Tesla by Blockchains LLC. In comparison, the giant Google only has 6km 2 of land. The most likely hypothesis is that this young company, whose investors we do not really know, plans to create a city based on the Blockchain and the Ethereum network.
The Ethereum blockchain takes up several principles introduced by Bitcoin, in particular “mining”. Mining is the term for the process of money creation common to Bitcoin and Ether. On July 30, 2015, the genesis block (the very first block of the Ethereum network) put into circulation the 60 million units corresponding to the presale. In addition, 12 million were also distributed to developers via the same block. Then, it was the turn of the community of miners (the nodes of the network) to take over to ensure monetary creation. The reward in this case is 5 Ether per block mined, at an average frequency of 15 seconds. This corresponds to an annual monetary creation of 10 million new units.
And unlike the deflationary thinking behind Bitcoin's money creation, there is no limit that has been set on Ethereum's money supply.
Ethereum is also and above all a network allowing the development of applications. Since 2017, hundreds of very serious businesses have appeared (payment, buying and selling services, etc.). These companies often use ETH to base their token.
The RoadMap is the set of forecasts provided by the development team of a cryptocurrency.
Just like with Bitcoin, the network is configured so that the mining difficulty is constantly adjusted to the computing power of the mining community.
Ethereum's growing success with the public quickly attracted a large number of new miners. The first repercussion of this craze is therefore an overall increase in the computing power of the entire community, followed by an increase in the difficulty of mining.
Indeed, the mining difficulty went from 2.3 to 3 TH in September 2017. This was the biggest increase in the level of difficulty that has been recorded so far. This mining difficulty increased again very strongly in 2020 to reach 4.4TH at the beginning of 2021. This frequency of increase in the level of difficulty reflects the increasing interest in Ethereum. But the evolution of the course does not necessarily follow that of the level of mining difficulty. Ultimately, this is a situation that will discourage independent miners for whom Ether will no longer be a profitable cryptocurrency. To avoid a surge in mining difficulty, updates can be scheduled. This was the case in 2018 with a new version of the software called Serenity. This new version has resulted in a change in the mining process, from Proof-of-Work (proof of work) type to a Proof-of-Stake (proof of stake) mining process. The objective of this maneuver was in particular to limit the electricity consumption of the Ethereum network. Serenity was also at the origin of reforms on the level of monetary creation of the network.
Read also our article : Cryptocurrency: How to Invest in Crypto, Bitcoin and Virtual currency
But beyond all these technical considerations, Ethereum is a cryptocurrency that is gaining more and more notoriety. The majority of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) of new cryptocurrency projects use Ethereum.
And even if for the moment many States are still showing skepticism vis-à-vis cryptocurrencies, some forward-thinking governments have already entered the market by favoring Ethereum. Thus, the National Research Council of Canada uses Ethereum for the execution of certain public contracts. It must be said that the mode of operation of the blockchain is particularly suited to the principle of transparency supposed to govern public expenditure. Switzerland, for its part, made it possible to accomplish administrative tasks via the Ethereum network (in the canton of Zug). Numerous examples in recent years show the massive spread of Ethereum even within institutions.
Ethereum can be exchanged against a very large part of traditional currencies (currencies having legal tender in a country) or against other virtual currencies. Thus many exchange platforms allow Ethereum to be exchanged for dollars, euros, Bitcoin, Ripple, Tether, etc.
Ethereum how much does it cost? Discover the value of Ethereum in euros in our quotation table.
As the chart below shows, the ETH / BTC ratio has declined overall since 2017. This means that Ethereum has generally underperformed against Bitcoin. Nevertheless, ETH exhibits an interesting characteristic which results in ETH outperforming Bitcoin in times of rally.. Since the end of 2020, for example, Ethereum has benefited from a powerful catch-up phenomenon on Bitcoin. Ethereum is somewhat what silver is to physical gold (it is more volatile than the benchmark asset and benefits from greater bullish or bearish effects). In the short term, therefore, Ethereum is maintaining an outperformance over Bitcoin at the start of 2021. A continuity of this outperformance could accelerate if it intensifies slightly in the coming months with regard to the indicators.
Moreover, in the longer term, the annual average performance of ETH also remains more interesting than that of Bitcoin. Ethereum is a pillar of several hundred companies that have developed projects based on Blockchain or more generally crypto currencies. As the number of global users increases ( today by 1.3% of the global population ), this catch-up effect of Ethereum on Bitcoin could intensify.
At the start of 2021, Bitcoin has a capitalization 4 times greater than Ethereum ($ 630 billion against $ 155 billion). The gap is therefore much smaller than in 2017. Indeed, at the start of 2017, Bitcoin had a capitalization 16 times greater than Ethereum ($ 15 billion against $ 900 million). Likewise, the price differential was 120 at the start of 2017, against 25 at the start of 2021. Thus, in 4 years, we see a reduction in the capitalization gap multiplied by 4 and a reduction in the price gap of nearly 5 . The sharp reduction in the ETH-BTC spread can be explained in large part by investor confidence in Ethereum. Ethereum is closer to the diffusion of Blockchain technology than Bitcoin.
So, in the long run, as long as the number of crypto users keeps increasing, the fundamental trend should remain good. In addition, the positioning of institutional investors should prevent a significant collapse in the price.
At the start of 2021, Bitcoin has a capitalization 4 times greater than Ethereum ($ 630 billion against $ 155 billion). The gap is therefore much smaller than in 2017. Indeed, at the start of 2017, Bitcoin had a capitalization 16 times greater than Ethereum ($ 15 billion against $ 900 million). Likewise, the price differential was 120 at the start of 2017, against 25 at the start of 2021. Thus, in 4 years, we see a reduction in the capitalization gap multiplied by 4 and a reduction in the price gap of nearly 5 . The sharp reduction in the ETH-BTC spread can be explained in large part by investor confidence in Ethereum. Ethereum is closer to the diffusion of Blockchain technology than Bitcoin.
So, in the long run, as long as the number of crypto users keeps increasing, the fundamental trend should remain good. In addition, the positioning of institutional investors should prevent a significant collapse in the price.
Globally, cryptocurrencies are following the same trend. There is therefore a correlation with certain fundamentals. Indeed, crypto currencies are not devoid of fundamental correlations. An important correlation appears with the economic cycle .
This graph, which uses the financial stress index established by the Federal Reserve Economic Data (blue curve) and the price of Bitcoin, tends to show that Bitcoin begins a bullish rally after each relaxation of financial stress. This was the case after the economic slowdown (decrease in growth rate) of 2015/2016, and again from the slowdown of 2018/2019, and partly after the - less notable - of 2012/2013.
Thus, it is interesting to position yourself after each peak of financial stress (VIX). As long as crypto currencies are still speculative, this link, also valid on ETH, should be maintained. The importance of monetary cycles is therefore also palpable.
Also, cryptocurrencies react differently to physical gold. It is not fundamentally fair to make a comparison between Ethereum (or Bitcoin) and gold. Gold is an asset already inserted in the financial landscape and does not have an exchange function. For its part, Ethereum is being inserted into the financial landscape and has an exchange function. Therefore, in the long term, as the number of cryptocurrency users increases, the fundamental trend should remain good. Obviously, the rise of cryptos is attracting institutional investors , which amplifies the phenomenon.
The function of exchanging crypto currencies is not a negligible factor. A very large number of people trade in crypto currencies. Unlike their traditional bank account, the crypto currencies received are most often not exchanged ( accumulation of payments received ). This phenomenon of capitalization through exchange inevitably causes an increase in price and volumes over time. It is the heart of the success of crypto currencies.
As we have seen, crypto currencies remain (very) volatile assets. Ethereum, in particular, is more sensitive than Bitcoin to fundamental variations. Thus, the share of his portfolio in Ethereum should ideally remain low, especially in periods of financial stress (lack of liquidity, bank tensions, etc.).
In addition, Ethereum can be considered as the "dung beetle index" of the crypto industry. Many business tokens are based on ETH. The more the sector of decentralized finance and investment platforms grows, the more ETH will be favored. ETH allows for implicit diversification, which also justifies potentially greater exposure to ETH than to other crypto currencies with a smaller capitalization.
Warning: given the pronounced volatility that characterizes the price of crypto currencies, those who choose to redirect a certain portion of their savings to this asset should pay particular attention to the evolution of its price.
Remember also that you should only spend money on a cryptocurrency investment that you are prepared to lose.
There are various possibilities to buy Ethereum directly or indirectly. First, many stock market brokers offer the possibility of going into derivatives. This is the case with brokers like Intelligent Cryptocurrency
, IG, XTB , etc. Derivatives allow virtual currencies to be traded in the short term and require in-depth knowledge of financial markets.
Then there are brokers specializing in crypto currencies like Binance, Coinbase , Coinhouse, Kraken, Bitpanda, etc. This is usually the best way to invest in crypto for the medium to long term. These platforms allow you to buy or sell a wide range of crypto currencies, including Ethereum. Transaction fees are quite variable. Note also that capital outflow fees are applied by some platforms.
What is Ethereum?
Ethereum (ETH) is a decentralized exchange protocol that, via a Turing-complete language, allows users to set up smart contracts. It is also the Ether virtual currency network, this crypto currency that challenges Bitcoin , based like him on blockchain technology.
How to buy Ethereum?
To invest in Ethereum, it is possible to buy tokens or to position themselves up or down in Ether via derivatives. Online brokers like eToro, IG or even XTB allow you to trade cryptos and specialized platforms like Coinbase, Kraken or Binance allow you to buy virtual currencies.
Should you invest in Ethereum?
An investment in Ethereum is a must if you want to invest in cryptocurrencies . Investing in Ethereum will allow you to diversify by positioning yourself on one of the most important virtual currencies, which significantly follows the variations of Bitcoin, while adopting a higher volatility.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ethereum Logo
Ethereum Foundation, Hyperledger, Nethermind, OpenEthereum, EthereumJS
Initial release
30 July 2015; 5 years ago
Muir Glacier / 1 January 2020; 13 months ago
Development status
Active
Software used
EVM 1 Bytecode
Go, Rust, C#, C++, Java, Python
x86-64, ARM
300 GB (2020-03)
Distributed Computing
Active hosts
10,335 (2021-01)
Website
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin.[1] Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain.[2][3]
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.[4][5] The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is Turing-complete, can execute scripts and run decentralized applications.[6][7] Ethereum is used for decentralized finance, and has been utilized for many initial coin offerings.
In 2016, a hacker exploited a flaw in a third-party project called The DAO and stole $50 million of Ether.[8] As a result, the Ethereum community voted to hard fork the blockchain to reverse the theft[9] and Ethereum Classic (ETC) continued as the original chain.[10]
Ethereum has started implementing a series of upgrades called Ethereum 2.0, which includes a transition to proof of stake and an increase in transaction throughput using sharding.[11][12]
Contents
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin in 2015
Ethereum was initially described in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin,[13] a programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, in late 2013 with a goal of building decentralized applications.[14][15] Buterin argued that Bitcoin and blockchain technology could benefit from other applications besides money and needed a scripting language for application development that could lead to attaching real-world assets, such as stocks and property, to the blockchain.[16] In 2013, Buterin briefly worked with eToro CEO Yoni Assia on the Colored Coins project and drafted its white paper outlining additional use cases for blockchain technology.[17] However, after failing to gain agreement on how the project should proceed, he proposed the development of a new platform with a more general scripting language that would eventually become Ethereum.[4]
Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, in January 2014.[18] During the conference, a group of people rented a house in Miami: Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, and Anthony Di Iorio from Toronto who financed the project.[18] Di Iorio invited friend Joseph Lubin, who invited reporter Morgen Peck, to bear witness.[18] Six months later the founders met again in a house in Zug, Switzerland, where Buterin told the founders that the project would proceed as a non-profit. Hoskinson left the project at that time.[18]
Ethereum has an unusually long list of founders. Anthony Di Iorio wrote: "Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, Myself, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie & Amir Chetrit (the initial 5) in December 2013. Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, & Jeffrey Wilcke were added in early 2014 as founders." Formal development of the software began in early 2014 through a Swiss company, Ethereum Switzerland GmbH (EthSuisse).[19] The basic idea of putting executable smart contracts in the blockchain needed to be specified before the software could be implemented. This work was done by Gavin Wood, then the chief technology officer, in the Ethereum Yellow Paper that specified the Ethereum Virtual Machine.[20] Subsequently, a Swiss non-profit foundation, the Ethereum Foundation (Stiftung Ethereum), was created as well. Development was funded by an online public crowdsale from July to August 2014, with the participants buying the Ethereum value token (Ether) with another digital currency, Bitcoin. While there was early praise for the technical innovations of Ethereum, questions were also raised about its security and scalability.[14]
In 2019, Ethereum Foundation employee Virgil Griffith was arrested by the US government for presenting at a blockchain conference in North Korea.[21]
Buterin chose the name Ethereum after browsing a list of elements from science fiction on Wikipedia. He stated, "I immediately realized that I liked it better than all of the other alternatives that I had seen; I suppose it was the fact that [it] sounded nice and it had the word 'ether', referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel."[18] Buterin wanted his platform to be the underlying and imperceptible medium for the applications running on top of it.[22]
Code name
Release date
Release block
Frontier
7/30/2015
0
Ice Age
9/8/2015
200,000
Homestead
3/15/2016
1,150,000
DAO Fork (unplanned)
7/20/2016
1,920,000
Tangerine Whistle (unplanned)
10/18/2016
2,463,000
Spurious Dragon
11/23/2016
2,675,000
Byzantium
10/16/2017
4,370,000
Constantinople
2/28/2019
7,280,000
Petersburg (unplanned)
2/28/2019
7,280,000
Istanbul
12/8/2019
9,069,000
Muir Glacier
1/1/2020
9,200,000
Berlin (planned)
TBD
TBD
Several codenamed prototypes of Ethereum were developed by the Ethereum Foundation as part of their proof of concept series. "Olympic" was the last prototype and public beta pre-release. The Olympic network provided users with a bug bounty of 25,000 Ether for stress testing the limits of the Ethereum blockchain. In July 2015, "Frontier" marked the tentative experimental release of the Ethereum platform.[23]
Since the initial launch, Ethereum has undergone several planned protocol upgrades, which are important changes affecting the underlying functionality and/or incentive structures of the platform.[24][25] Protocol upgrades are accomplished by means of a hard fork. The latest upgrade to Ethereum was "Muir Glacier", implemented on 1 January 2020.
In 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization called The DAO, a set of smart contracts developed on the platform, raised a record US$150 million in a crowdsale to fund the project.[26] The DAO was exploited in June 2016 when US$50 million of DAO tokens were stolen by an unknown hacker.[27][28] The event sparked a debate in the crypto-community about whether Ethereum should perform a contentious "hard fork" to reappropriate the affected funds.[29] It resulted in the network splitting into two blockchains: Ethereum with the theft reversed and Ethereum Classic which continued on the original chain.[30] The hard fork created a rivalry between the two networks. After the hard fork, Ethereum subsequently forked twice in the fourth quarter of 2016 to deal with other attacks.
In March 2017, various blockchain startups, research groups, and Fortune 500 companies announced the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) with 30 founding members.[31] By May 2017, the nonprofit organization had 116 enterprise members – including ConsenSys, CME Group, Cornell University's research group, Toyota Research Institute, Samsung SDS, Microsoft, Intel, J. P. Morgan, Cooley LLP, Merck KGaA, DTCC, Deloitte, Accenture, Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, ING, and National Bank of Canada.[32][33] By July 2017, there were over 150 members in the alliance, including MasterCard, Cisco Systems, Sberbank, and Scotiabank.[34][35]
Code name
Release date
Release block
ETH 2.0 Phase 0 (Beacon Chain)
12/01/2020
0
ETH 2.0 Phase 1 (planned)
TBD
TBD
ETH 2.0 Phase 2 (planned)
TBD
TBD
Open-source development is currently underway for a major upgrade to Ethereum known as Ethereum 2.0 or Eth2.[36] The main purpose of the upgrade is to increase transaction throughput for the network from the current of about 15 transactions per second to up to tens of thousands of transactions per second.[37]
The plan is to increase throughput by splitting up the workload into many blockchains running in parallel (referred to as sharding) and then having them all share a common consensus proof of stake blockchain, so that to maliciously tamper with one chain would require that one tamper with the common consensus, which would cost the attacker far more money than they could ever gain from the attack.
Ethereum 2.0 (also known as Serenity) is designed to be launched in three phases:
"Phase 0" was launched on 1 December 2020 and created the Beacon Chain, a proof of stake (PoS) blockchain that will act as the central coordination and consensus hub of Ethereum 2.0.[38][39][40]
"Phase 1" will create shard chains and connect them to the Beacon Chain.
"Phase 2" will implement state execution in the shard chains[12] with the current Ethereum 1.0 chain expected to become one of the shards of Ethereum 2.0.
Ethereum is a permissionless, non-hierarchical network of computers (nodes) which build and come to consensus on an ever-growing series of "blocks", or batches of transactions, known as the blockchain. Each block contains an identifier of the block that it must immediately follow in the chain if it is to be considered valid. Whenever a node adds a block to its chain, it executes the transactions therein in their order, thereby altering the ETH balances and other storage values of Ethereum accounts. These balances and values, collectively known as the state, are maintained on the node's computer separately from the blockchain, in a Merkle Patricia tree.
Each node communicates with a relatively small subset of the network, known as its peers. Whenever a node wishes to include a new transaction in the blockchain, it sends it to its peers, who then send it to their peers, and so on. In this way, it propagates throughout the network. Certain nodes, called miners, maintain a list of all of these new transactions and use them to create new blocks, which they then send to the rest of the network. Whenever a node receives a block, it checks the validity of the block and of all of the transactions therein and, if valid, adds it to its blockchain and executes all of said transactions. As the network is non-hierarchical, a node may receive competing blocks, which may form competing chains. The network comes to consensus on the blockchain by following the "longest chain rule", which states that the chain with the most blocks at any given time is the canonical chain. This rule achieves consensus because miners do not want to expend their computational work trying to add blocks to a chain that will be abandoned by the network.
Ether (ETH) is the cryptocurrency generated by the Ethereum protocol as a reward to miners in a proof of work system for adding blocks to the blockchain. It is the only currency accepted in the payment of transaction fees, which also go to miners. The terms "Ether" and "Ethereum" have become interchangeable in the cryptocurrency community.[41] The block reward together with the transaction fees provide the incentive to miners to keep the blockchain growing (ie. to keep processing new transactions). Therefore, Ether is fundamental to the operation of the network. Each Ethereum account has an ETH balance and may send ETH to any other account. The smallest unit of ETH is known as a Wei and is equal to 10-18 ETH. [42]
Ether is listed on exchanges under the ticker symbol ETH. The Greek uppercase Xi character (Ξ) is sometimes used for its currency symbol.
The shift to Ethereum 2.0 may reduce the issuance rate of Ether.[43] There is currently no implemented hard cap on the total supply of Ether.[44]
There are two types of accounts on Ethereum: user accounts (also known as externally-owned accounts) and contracts. Both types have an ETH balance, may send ETH to any account, may call any public function of a contract or create a new contract, and are identified on the blockchain and in the state by their address.[45]
User accounts are the only type which may create transactions. For a transaction to be valid, it must be signed using the account's private key, a 64-character hexadecimal string that should only be known to the account's owner. The signature algorithm used is ECDSA. Importantly, this algorithm has the property that it allows one to derive the signer's address from the signature without knowing the private key.
Contracts are the only type of account which has associated code (a set of functions and variable declarations) and contract storage (the values of the variables at any given time). Contracts are passive entities, only able to do anything as a result of an account calling one of its functions. During the execution of its code, a contract may: send ETH, alter its storage values, create temporary storage (memory) that dies at the end of the function, call any of its own functions, call any public function of a different contract, create a new contract, and query information about the current transaction or the blockchain.[46]
Addresses
Ethereum addresses are composed of the prefix "0x", a common identifier for hexadecimal, concatenated with the rightmost 20 bytes of the Keccak-256 hash of the ECDSA public key (the curve used is the so-called secp256k1). In hexadecimal, 2 digits represent a byte, meaning addresses contain 40 hexadecimal digits, e.g. 0xb794f5ea0ba39494ce839613fffba74279579268. Contract addresses are in the same format, however, they are determined by sender and creation transaction nonce.[47]
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the runtime environment for smart contracts in Ethereum. It is a 256-bit register stack designed to run the same code exactly as intended. It is the fundamental consensus mechanism for Ethereum. The formal definition of the EVM is specified in the Ethereum Yellow Paper.[47][48] EVMs have been implemented in C++, C#, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Rust, Elixir, Erlang, and soon WebAssembly.
Gas is a unit of account within the EVM used in the calculation of a transaction fee, which is the amount of ETH a transaction's sender must pay to the miner who includes the transaction in the blockchain.
Each type of operation which may be performed by the EVM is hardcoded with a certain gas cost, which is intended to be roughly proportional to the amount of resources (computation and storage) a node must expend to perform that operation. When creating a transaction, the sender must specify a gas limit and gas price. The gas limit is the maximum amount of gas the sender is willing to use in the transaction, and the gas price is the amount of ETH the sender wishes to pay to the miner per unit of gas used. The higher the gas price, the more incentive a miner has to include the transaction in their block, and thus the quicker the transaction will be included in the blockchain. For a transaction to be valid, the sender's starting ETH balance must be greater than or equal to gas limit × gas price. The sender buys the full amount of gas (ie. the gas limit) up-front, at the start of the execution of the transaction, and is refunded at the end for any gas not used. If at any point the transaction does not have enough gas to perform the next operation, the transaction is reverted but the sender still pays for the gas used. Gas prices are typically denominated in Gwei, a subunit of ETH equal to 10-9 ETH.[49]
This fee mechanism is designed to mitigate transaction spam, prevent infinite loops during contract execution, and provide for a market-based allocation of network resources.
On social governance
Our governance is inherently social, people who are more connected in the community have more power, a kind of soft power.
Vlad Zamfir, Ethereum core developer, The New Yorker[18]
In October 2015,[50] a development governance was proposed as the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), standardized on EIP-1.[51] The core development group and community were to gain consensus by a process regulated EIP.[52][53]
The difficulty bomb is a mechanism where the difficulty of blockchain mining began increasing in November 2016, from block 200,000. This onset is referred to as Ethereum's Ice Age, which was implemented as an incentive for the network to transition from a PoW to a PoS blockchain. A difficulty bomb was scheduled in February 2019 but was pushed back by developers.[54]
Ethereum is different from Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency with the largest market capitalization as of 2020, in several aspects:[55][56]
Bitcoin is a singular form of digital money where users can send, receive, and hold only bitcoins. Ethereum is a smart contract platform which allows entities to leverage blockchain technology to create numerous different digital ledgers and can be used to create additional cryptocurrencies that run on top of its blockchain. For example, Ethereum can be used to create tokens that are pegged 1:1 with the value of the United States dollar (called a stablecoin) if a user wanted to transfer or hold the value of dollars on the blockchain. Ether itself can also be sent, received and held as digital money.
Bitcoin is aimed to only be money, compared with Ethereum where a goal is to also run applications (like the Google Play or Apple App store).
Its block time is 13 seconds, compared to 10 minutes for bitcoin.
Mining of Ether generates new coins at a usually consistent rate, occasionally changing during hard forks, while for bitcoin the rate halves every 4 years.
For proof of work (PoW), Ethereum uses the Ethash algorithm, which is intended to reduce the advantage of specialized ASICs in mining.
Transaction fees differ by computational complexity, bandwidth use, and storage needs (in a system known as gas), while bitcoin transactions compete by means of transaction size in bytes.
Ethereum uses an accounting system where values in Wei (the smallest denomination of 1 Ether, 1 ETH = 1018 Wei) are debited from accounts and credited to another, as opposed to Bitcoin's UTXO system, which is more analogous to spending cash and receiving change in return.
The EVM's instruction set is Turing-complete, meaning that Ethereum contracts can do anything that computer programs in general can do. Popular uses of Ethereum have included the creation of fungible (ERC20) and non-fungible (ERC721) tokens with a variety of properties, crowdfunding (eg. initial coin offerings), decentralized finance, decentralized exchanges, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), games, prediction markets, and verifiably-fair gambling.
Ethereum's smart contracts are written in high-level programming languages and then compiled down to EVM bytecode and deployed to the Ethereum blockchain. They can be written in Solidity (a language library with similarities to C and JavaScript), Serpent (similar to Python, but deprecated), Yul (an intermediate language that can compile to various different backends – EVM 1.0, EVM 1.5 and eWASM are planned), LLL (a low-level Lisp-like language), and Mutan (Go-based, but deprecated). There is also a research-oriented language under development called Vyper (a strongly-typed Python-derived decidable language). Source code and compiler information are usually published along with the launch of the contract so that users can see the code and verify that it compiles to the bytecode that is on-chain.
One issue related to using smart contracts on a public blockchain is that bugs, including security holes, are visible to all but cannot be fixed quickly.[57] One example of this is the 2016 attack on The DAO, which could not be quickly stopped or reversed.[27]
There is ongoing research on how to use formal verification to express and prove non-trivial properties. A Microsoft Research report noted that writing solid smart contracts can be extremely difficult in practice, using The DAO hack to illustrate this problem. The report discussed tools that Microsoft had developed for verifying contracts, and noted that a large-scale analysis of published contracts is likely to uncover widespread vulnerabilities. The report also stated that it is possible to verify the equivalence of a Solidity program and the EVM code.[58]
The ERC-20 Token Standard allows for fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. Numerous cryptocurrencies have launched as ERC-20 tokens and have been distributed through initial coin offerings.[59] Fees to send ERC-20 tokens must be paid with Ether.
Ethereum also allows for the creation of unique and indivisible tokens that cannot be directly exchanged for one another, called non-fungible tokens (NFTs).[60] Since these types of tokens are unique, they have been used to represent digital art, sports memorabilia, virtual real estate and gaming.[61] NFTs generally sell on the Ethereum blockchain through various digital auction websites. In 2021, Christie's began to sell NFT artwork.[62]
Main article: Decentralized finance
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a use case of Ethereum.[63] It offers traditional financial instruments in a decentralized architecture, outside of companies' and governments' control, such as money market funds which let users earn interest.[64] Examples of DeFi platforms include MakerDAO and Compound. Uniswap, a decentralized exchange for tokens on Ethereum grew from $20 million in liquidity to $2.9 billion in 2020.[65] As of October 2020, over $11 billion was invested in various DeFi protocols.[66] Additionally, through a process called "wrapping", certain DeFi protocols allow synthetic versions of various assets (such as Bitcoin, gold and oil) to become available and tradeable on Ethereum and also compatible with all of Ethereum's major wallets and applications.[66]
Ethereum-based software and networks, independent from the public Ethereum chain, are being tested by enterprise software companies.[67] Interested parties include Microsoft, IBM, JPMorgan Chase,[42] Deloitte, R3, and Innovate UK (cross-border payments prototype).[68] Barclays, UBS, Credit Suisse, Amazon, and other companies are also experimenting with Ethereum.[69][70]
Ethereum-based permissioned blockchain variants are used and being investigated for various projects.
In 2017, JPMorgan Chase proposed developing JPM Coin on a permissioned-variant of Ethereum blockchain dubbed "Quorum".[71] It is "designed to toe the line between private and public in the realm of shuffling derivatives and payments. The idea is to satisfy regulators who need seamless access to financial goings-on while protecting the privacy of parties that don't wish to reveal their identities nor the details of their transactions to the general public."[72]
The Royal Bank of Scotland has announced that it has built a Clearing and Settlement Mechanism (CSM) based on the Ethereum distributed ledger and smart contract platform.
In Ethereum, all smart contracts are stored publicly on every node of the blockchain, which has costs. Being a blockchain means it is secure by design[clarification needed] and is an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. The downside is that performance issues arise in that every node is calculating all the smart contracts in real-time, resulting in lower speeds. As of January 2016, the Ethereum protocol could process about 25 transactions per second. In comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45,000 payments per second leading some to question the scalability of Ethereum.[73] On 19 December 2016, Ethereum exceeded one million transactions in a single day for the first time.[74]
Ethereum engineers have been working on sharding the calculations, and the next step (Ethereum 2) was presented at Ethereum's Devcon 3 in November 2017.[75]
Ethereum's blockchain uses Merkle trees, for security reasons, to improve scalability, and to optimize transaction hashing.[76] As with any Merkle tree implementation, it allows for storage savings, set membership proofs (called "Merkle proofs"), and light client synchronization. The network has faced congestion problems, such as in 2017 in relation to Cryptokitties.[77]
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