Ethereum and Ether are two terms that are most often than not used interchangeably. In reality, Ethereum is a decentralised open-source blockchain system with its own cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH). Ethereum provides a platform for a variety of cryptocurrencies as well as decentralised smart contract execution.
History
Vitalik Buterin first described Ethereum in a whitepaper in 2013. Buterin and his co-founders raised funds for the project through an online public crowd sale in the summer of 2014. The project team raised $18.3 million in Bitcoin, and the price of Ether in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) was $0.311, with more than 60 million Ether sold. Using Ethereum’s current pricing, the annualised return on investment (ROI) is over 270 percent, effectively quadrupling the investment every year since the summer of 2014.
The Ethereum Blockchain
The Ethereum Foundation formally unveiled the blockchain on July 30, 2015, under the codename “Frontier.” Several network updates have occurred since then, including “Constantinople” on February 28, 2019, “Istanbul” on December 8, 2019, “Muir Glacier” on January 2, 2020, “Berlin” on April 14, 2021, and, most recently, the “London” hard fork on August 5, 2021.
The declared goal of Ethereum is to become a global platform for decentralised programmes, allowing anyone all over the world to design and execute software that is resistant to censorship, outages, and fraud.
Ethereum co-founders
Ethereum has eight co-founders, which is very high for a cryptocurrency project. They first met in Zug, Switzerland, on June 7, 2014.
Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian, is possibly the most well-known of the group. He wrote the first white paper describing Ethereum in 2013 and continues to work on enhancing the platform to this day. Buterin formerly co-founded and wrote for the Bitcoin Magazine news website as well.
Gavin Wood, a British programmer, is arguably the second most important co-founder of ETH, having coded the first technical implementation of Ethereum in the C++ programming language. He also proposed Ethereum’s native programming language Solidity, and served as the Ethereum Foundation’s first chief technology officer. Wood previously worked as a research scientist at Microsoft. He then went on to found the Web3 Foundation.
Anthony Di Iorio, who underwrote the project in its early stages, is another Ethereum co-founder.
Joseph Lubin, is a Canadian entrepreneur who, like Di Iorio, helped fund Ethereum in its early days and later formed ConsenSys, an incubator for Ethereum-based enterprises.
Another co-founder is Charles Hoskinson, who was instrumental in founding the Ethereum Foundation and its legal structure in Switzerland.
Mihai Alisie also assisted in the establishment of the Ethereum Foundation. Finally, Indian origin Amir Chetrit had helped co-found Ethereum but left early in its development.
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