What is Ethereum MEANING?

Ethereum meaning is not so different from Bitcoin.

Ethereum (ETH) is one of the major Bitcoin rivals in the cryptocurrency market.

In fact, it is the second largest cryptocurrency with the market capitalization of more than $43.2 billion.

Some investors actually believe that in ETH will overtake Bitcoin as the number #1 cryptocurrency by market cap in the coming years.

Ethereum was developed by a 19 year old programmer from Toronto, Vitalik Buterin.

He first had interest in bitcoin in 2011 and was actually  a co-founder of the online news website Bitcoin magazine.

However, he did not stop at that but went ahead to see his dream come true.

Vitalik Buterin came up with an idea that would go beyond what Bitcoin can do.

He designed a different platform any type of decentralized application developers would want to build and he called it Ethereum.

Finally, Ethereum was launched in 2015 and had an initial offering of ether as the cryptocurrency behind it.

 Ethereum meaning

Ethereum meaning is not complicated as you imagine. ETH (Ethereum) is an open software platform based on blockchain technology.

It is just like bitcoin only that Ethereum enables developers to build and add more decentralized applications on the same platform.

In other wards, it allows developers to create whatever operations they want.

Therefore you can build a thousand of different applications using only one platform.

Ethereum is not only a digital currency but also a blockchain based platform.

It features the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), smart contracts and uses ether for peer to peer contracts.

Ethereum also uses mining to validate its transactions.  The miners provide a mathematical proof faster than the other competitors and get a token called Ether.

So as bitcoin rewards with bitcoins every time a miner completes the complex mathematical equation, ethereum rewards Ether after the proof of work.

 The History of Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin was initially a co-founder of the online news website Bitcoin magazine.

In 2013, he argued that Bitcoin needed a scripting language that would allow application development.

He forwarded the idea but couldn’t come to an agreement with the Bitcoin founders.

A few months later, he published and shared a detailed Ethereum official white paper.

With a support from his co- founders, Buterin launched Ethereum in 2014. These were; Mihai Alisie, Anthony Dilorio, Charles Hoskinson and Amir Chetrit.

Later that year,

They created a non-profit company Ethereum Foundation to support the development of the blockchain platform and its ecosystem.

And also registered company in Zug Switzerland.

During this period Hoskinson left while Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood and Jeffery Wilker joined the team.

Because the team needed funds to develop the platform, they launched a crowd founding campaign between July – September and raised more than $18 million.

Meanwhile, to develop the project successfully, they decided to divide the development process into four stages.

These include, Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity.

The Ethereum development process

The first process Frontier, was launched in July 2015 when Ethereum mined its first block. This allowed users to use the blockchain, mine Ethereum and build DApps.

In March 2016, Ethereum advanced to Homestead stage. On this stage stage, they introduced a lot of features and improvements.

In addition,this made a foundation for the future network upgrades.

Unfortunately, things did not go smoothly as planned. An anonymous hacker learnt of a flaw in the DAO project software and stole about $50 millions in Ether.

This led to a dispute and Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains.

The Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. Also the Ethereum initiated the hard fork to refund the stolen money.

This brings us to the third stage of Ethereum development. The Metropolis.

The metroplis stage consists of a series of hard forks to help in the transition of block chain networks from proof of work(POW) to proof of stake(POS).

Lastly, the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade(Serenity). This was launched in late 2019 and early 2020. This is Ethereum’s final stage.

The project aims at fixing any errors and the short comings of the blockchain platform.

For instance, the transition of blockchain network from proof of work to proof of stake.

The Ethereum 2.0 upgrade

Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, Eth2 is the final upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain.

It is to be released in three stages in 2020, this year starting with Phase 0

Stage 1, Phase 0; This will create a separate proof of stake blockchain network, the Beacon Chain

Stage 2, Phase 1; In this phase, they will create Shard Chains and connect them to the beacon chain

Stage 3, Phase 2; This is the implementation and execution stage of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade.

Just like Bitcoin, Ethereum is a good cryptocurrency to consider for investment.

Unlike Bitcoin which acts as a store of value, Ethereum is a platform that the cryptocurrency Ether works within.

Ether is a compensation for miners of Ethereum. It is not only a platform but also rewards with Ether as a cryptocurrency.

This simply means you can use Ethereum to do peer to peer transactions and also creating and building smart contracts and DApps.

In the next lesson, we shall look more into Ethereum meaning & how Ethereum works and how you can invest in Ethereum.