Bitcoin may be the king in terms of value but an encryption seeks to overthrow the entire edifice of the world economy.
This is Ethereum, a decentralised open source system that has its own encryption, called Ether. ETH acts as a platform for many other cryptocurrencies, as well as for the execution of decentralised smart contracts.
The goal of Ethereum is to become a global platform for decentralised applications, allowing users around the world to write and run software that is resistant to censorship, downtime and fraud.
Ethereum has many co-founders. They first met on June 7, 2014, in Zug, Switzerland. It’s a gathering of developers from around the world who have decided to change the world, or even better, the world economy.
The Ethereum team is:
- Russian-Canadian Vitalik Buterin is perhaps the best known of the team. He authored the original white paper first described by Ethereum in 2013 and continues to work to improve the platform to this day.
- British developer Gavin Wood is arguably the second most important co-founder of ETH, as he codified the first technical application of Ethereum in the C ++ programming language, proposed the Ethereum Solidity native programming language and was the first head of technology at the Ethereum Foundation. Prior to Ethereum, Wood was a researcher at Microsoft.
- Anthony Di Iorio, who took over the project during its first stage of development.
- Charles Hoskinson, who played a key role in founding the Ethereum Foundation based in Switzerland and its legal framework.
- Mihai Alisie, who helped establish the Ethereum Foundation.
- Joseph Lubin, a Canadian businessman who, like Di Iorio, helped fund Ethereum in its early days, and later founded an ETH-based start-up incubator called ConsenSys.
- Amir Chetrit, who helped the co-founder of Ethereum.
What makes Ethereum unique?
Ethereum pioneered the idea of a smart blockchain contract platform. Smart contracts are computer programs that automatically perform the necessary steps to fulfil an agreement between many parties on the Internet. They are designed to reduce the need for reliable intermediaries between contractors, thus reducing transaction costs while increasing transaction reliability.
Ethereum’s main innovation was to design a platform that allowed it to execute smart contracts using blockchain, which further enhances the already existing benefits of smart contract technology. The Ethereum blockchain was designed, according to co-founder Gavin Wood, as a kind of “one-off computer for the entire planet”, theoretically capable of making any program more robust, anti-censorship and less prone to fraud by running it on a global distribution network public nodes.
In addition to smart contracts, Ethereum blockchain can host other cryptocurrencies, called “tokens”, using the ERC-20 compatibility standard. In fact, this was the most common use for the ETH platform to date: to date, more than 280,000 ERC-20 compatible badges have been released. More than 40 of them create the top 100 cryptocurrencies with market capitalisation.
Nowadays, we have the increase of Ethereum gambling where players can actually use Ethereum to place bets and play casino games.
