ETH: The King in the Post-BTC Era
The crypto we are going to talk about today is ETH (Ether). When it comes to Ether, we need to start from Ethereum, the platform where the crypto was born.
As we all know, Ethereum is a world-renowned open-source public chain with smart contract features. The platform provides decentralized virtual machines for processing peer-to-peer contracts through its special cryptocurrency, ether, or ETH, which is our focus today.
The idea of Ethereum was put forward by a guy named Vitalik Buterin, a programmer who’s active in Bitcoin social media groups. One day, he suggested to the core developers of Bitcoin that BTC should have a better programming language for people to develop programs, but the proposal was not approved, which meant that Vitalik had to do it himself.
At the time, Vitalik believed that many programs could advance further by adopting Bitcoin-like principles. This was why he decided to build a new platform. One day in 2013, Vitalik released Ethereum White Paper and proposed the concept of Ethereum: “A Next-Generation Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Application Platform”. In 2014, Vitalik sought to raise funds via ICO, while investors also used BTC to buy ETH from the Foundation.
Ethereum was originally developed by Ethereum Switzerland GmbH, a Swiss-based company. The program was then transferred to a non-profit organization called Ethereum Foundation. During the infancy of Ethereum, some praised Ethereum’s tech innovations, but some others also questioned its security and scalability.
Here, we have to mention the king of all cryptos: BTC, which set the precedent for all decentralized cryptos. Bitcoin has fully tested the feasibility and security of blockchain technology for over five years.
That said, BTC is not the perfect leader, and one of its flaws lies in the scalability of its protocol. For example, there is only one symbol in the BTC network, and that’s BTC. Therefore, users cannot freely create other symbols, which means that certain functions will never be available in the BTC network. Additionally, Bitcoin uses a stack-based scripting language that’s flexible enough to enable functions such as multi-sig, but its flexibility becomes insufficient when it comes to building more advanced applications, such as decentralized exchanges. Such issues also triggered the appearance of Ethereum, which was designed to address the problem of BTC’s poor scalability.
Fast-forward to 2016: Ethereum gained market recognition as “the second generation of blockchain platform” as well as “BTC 2.0”, and the ETH price started to surge. Meanwhile, Ethereum also attracted flocks of non-developer users to its ecosystem. As the most famous group of non-developer users, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance was established in early 2017 by dozens of the world’s top financial institutions and tech companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Chicago Exchange Group, BNY Mellon, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, Intel, and Accenture. At the same time, ETH, the cryptocurrency created by Ethereum, became one of the most trending cryptos after BTC was born and is favored by most crypto exchanges. For instance, CoinEx, a world-renowned crypto exchange, supports ETH trading.
Compared with most other cryptocurrencies or blockchain technologies, Ethereum comes with some unique features, which include:
1. Smart contracts: Asmart contract, a program stored on the blockchain, is run by nodes, and users who need to run the program will have to pay a fee to the miner or the stakeholder;
2. Tokens: Smart contracts can create tokens, which are used by distributed applications. The tokenization of distributed applications brings users, investors, and managers onthe same page. Meanwhile, tokens can also be used for ICOs (initial coin offerings);
3. Uncle block:An uncle block is used to improve the trading volume by summarizing the shorter blockchains that are not included in the parent chain in time due to their slow speed.
4. Proof-of-stake: PoS ismore efficient compared withproof-of-work, saves a lot of computer resources wasted in mining, and avoids network centralization caused by special application integrated circuits.
5. Distributed applications: On Ethereum, distributed applications do not stop and cannot be shut down.As a relatively new development utilizing Bitcoin technology, Ethereum aims to implement a globally decentralized, un-ownable, digital computer for executing peer-to-peer contracts. To put it more simply, Ethereum is a world computer you can’t shut down.
For more information about ether (ETH), please go to:
Official website: https://ethereum.org/
Block explorer: https://etherscan.io/
Market cap ranking: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/
Buy ETH: https://www.coinex.com/exchange/ETH-USDT
ETH asset management: https://wallet.coinex.com/download
