More on Ethereum

Ethereum is a highly successful public blockchain by adoption, mindshare, and the number of developers working on Ethereum smart contracts and decentralised apps. Vitalik Buterin described Ethereum as a concept in a white paper in late 2013. This concept was developed by Dr Gavin Wood who published a technical yellow paper in April 2014. Since then, the development of Ethereum’s software has been managed by a community of developers. A crowdsale took place in July and August 2014 to fund development, and Ethereum’s live blockchain was launched on 30 July 2015. You can see the very first block here: https://etherscan.io/block/0.

The development team was funded by an online sale of ETH tokens during July to August 2014 where people could buy ETH tokens by paying in Bitcoin. Early investors received 2,000 ETH per BTC, and this was gradually reduced to 1,337 ETH per BTC over the course of about a month, to encourage investors to invest early. Crowdsale participants sent bitcoins to a Bitcoin address and received an Ethereum wallet containing the number of ETH bought. A little over 60m ETH was sold this way for more than 31,500 BTC, worth about US$18m at the time. An additional 20% (12m ETH) were created to fund development and the Ethereum Foundation.

Vitalik Buterin, known as the creator of Ethereum, sits on the council of the foundation, and the foundation has a great deal of influence into the roadmap of Ethereum. In theory, Ethereum participants (miners, bookkeepers) don’t have to implement any software changes made by the
Foundation, but in practice they do. The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance is a non-profit industry group
launched in March 2017 whose goal seems to be to make Ethereum suitable for enterprise use.

Like Bitcoin, the price of Ether has also been through ups and downs. Ethereum’s crowdsale was at a price of 2,000 ETH to 1 BTC, and at the time (July-Aug 2014), 1 BTC was worth about $500, making 1 ETH =$0.25. At its peak in early 2018, the price of ETH almost touched $1,500. So, to date, Ether has been a highly successful cryptocurrency in terms of price.

Compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum has an additional use case. Its token ETH is often used in ICOs. A company that runs an ICO will create a smart contract on Ethereum which will automatically create tokens and assign them to Ethereum addresses who have sent Ether to a related smart contract. This means you can run an automated ICO on Ethereum, as long as investors pay in ETH or another token recorded on Ethereum.