Ethereum is an open-source public service that uses blockchain technology to enable smart contracts and cryptocurrency transactions without middlemen, but "what did Ethereum start at?". We will tell you in this article.
What did Ethereum start at?
Ethereum's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin said, “I thought [those in the Bitcoin community] weren't approaching the problem in the right way. I thought they were going after individual applications; they were trying to kind of explicitly support each in a sort of Swiss Army knife protocol.”
He imagined another way. Buterin got involved with Bitcoin in 2011 as a 17-year-old programmer, and when he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, he discovered and fell in love with blockchain technology. He began envisioning a platform beyond the financial use cases enabled by Bitcoin, publishing a white paper in 2013 using a popular scripting language to describe what would eventually become Ethereum.
Bitcoin's main differentiator was the platform's ability to trade more than cryptocurrencies. In 2014, Buterin and other co-founders of Ethereum launched a crowdsourcing campaign to sell Ether (Ethereum tokens) to participants to help launch the vision, raising over $18 million.
The first live release on Ethereum, known as Frontier, was released in 2015. Since then, the platform has grown rapidly and today has hundreds of developers involved. Ultimately, Buterin hopes that Ethereum will be the solution for all blockchain use cases that don't have a dedicated system.
Ethereum still suffers from growth pains and suffers from some of the same problems as Bitcoin, mainly in its scalability. In 2016, an anonymous hacker stole $50 million of Ether, and the security of the platform was questioned. This caused a schism within the Ethereum community, splitting it into two blockchains: Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). While the price of Ether has experienced dramatic fluctuations, the Ethereum currency has grown by over 13,000% in 2017. While this tremendous growth is attractive to many investors, the volatility makes others wary.
Future of Ethereum
Ethereum is a major player in the crypto space as evidenced by its market capitalization and wide range of solution companies built on the Ethereum blockchain. However, the network struggled to scale. The move to Eth2 aims to solve that challenge. Only time will tell and expect the transition to take some time.
I hope you gain more knowledge about Ethereum after reading this article "what did Ethereum start at? and "the future of Ethereum".
