Ethereum is a public blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality. It supports a modified version of Nakamoto consensus via transaction-based state transitions. Ethereum was proposed in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Development was funded by an online crowdsale that took place between July and August 2014.
The system went live on 30 July 2015, with 11.9 million coins “premined” for the crowdsale. This accounts for approximately 13 percent of the total circulating supply.
In 2016, as a result of the collapse of The DAO project, Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains – the new separate version became Ethereum (ETH), and the original continued as Ethereum Classic (ETC). The value of the ETH token was initially $0.
30 after the split and rose to $14 by early 2018.
Ethereum has been used in a variety of pilot projects and proof-of-concepts, mostly in the area of finance. These have included projects such as Augur, MakerDAO, Compound (finance), Gnosis prediction market, dYdX margin trading platform, Set protocol, Melonport asset management service, OmiseGO decentralized exchange and payment service, Bancor decentralized liquidity network, Status decentralized messaging app with light wallet functionality, WeTrust decentralized banking platform, uPort decentralized identity management platform, Blockcat decentralized application hosting platform, Civic identity verification tool and Metal music distribution platform using blockchain technology to achieve trustless royalty payments.
There are currently over 2,000 decentralized applications (or “dapps”) built on Ethereum. Several notable examples are listed below.
The first stablecoin on Ethereum was launched in July 2018 – USD Coin (USDC) is an ERC20 token issued by Circle and backed 1:1 by US dollars held in reserve. In September 2018, there were over 50 stablecoins available on Ethereum.
In May 2019 Facebook announced their plans to launch a stablecoin called Libra on a permissioned blockchain that will be backed by a basket of assets including fiat currencies and government securities. Calibra, Facebook’s digital wallet for Libra will be available on Messenger and WhatsApp with plans to expand to other platforms in the future.
Libra is scheduled to launch in 2020.
As of September 2019, Ethereum’s network is estimated to process around 15 transactions per second. In comparison Bitcoin’s network can process around 7 transactions per second and Visa’s network can process around 24000 transactions per second.
On 18 June 2016 at 13:24:28 UTC+2 Vitalik Buterin burned 48660 ETH (equivalent to $60 million at that time) sending them to a black hole address “0x00…” creating an irretrievable state resulting in permanent loss of ETH preventing their further use or double spending as part of an experiment meant to discourage hoarding or excessive accumulation of ETH tokens which according to Buterin could lead to centralization pressures over time due to the difficulty individuals would have participating in consensus if they didn’t own a large amount of ETH.”.
What will Ethereum be in 2025?
This is impossible to predict, but it is possible that Ethereum will still be around in 2025. It has a lot of potential and it has already made significant progress since it was first created in 2015.