What is Ethereum (ETH)?

Token Name: Ethereum (ETH)

Issue Date: 2015-7-30

Total Supply: 120,708,311.76 ETH

Token in Circulation: 120,708,311.76 ETH

White paper: https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/

Official website: https://ethereum.org/

Block query: https://etherscan.io/

Explore the ETHUSDT chart here to learn more.

 

Ethereum, often referred to as the "world's computer," is an open-source, globally decentralized computing infrastructure where programs known as smart contracts can be executed.

Ethereum uses blockchain to synchronize and store the system's state, leveraging Ether (ETH) to measure and allocate the resources consumed during program execution.

 

Ethereum provides developers with a secure platform to construct decentralized applications (DApps) and incorporates economic functionality. While offering features like high availability, auditability, transparency, and neutrality, Ethereum also reduces or eliminates censorship, third-party involvement, and counterparty risks.

 

In late 2013, Vitalik Buterin released the Ethereum whitepaper (also referred to as the Yellow Paper). Subsequently, Gavin Wood (now the founder of Polkadot) joined as a co-founder of Ethereum. The founders of Ethereum envisioned it as a versatile computing platform that offers other developers a secure and programmable environment. With Ethereum, developers no longer needed to construct consensus algorithms, peer-to-peer networks, and foundational algorithms. Instead, they could directly build the decentralized applications they desired on the Ethereum platform.

 

The Ethereum founding team dedicated over a year to turning Ethereum from theory into reality. On July 30, 2015, the first Ethereum block was successfully mined, marking the successful launch of Ethereum and the commencement of its journey to becoming the world's computer.

 

ETH is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network. The purpose of ETH is to enable the marketization of computation, providing participants with economic incentives for verifying and executing transaction requests, thereby contributing computational resources to the network.

 

Apart from serving as an economic incentive to encourage validators to execute transaction requests, ETH also acts as a safeguard against malicious entities attempting to congest the Ethereum network by executing infinite computations or other resource-intensive scripts. This ensures network security as participants are required to pay a certain fee for utilizing computational resources.

 

We can think of smart contracts on Ethereum as immutable programs that run in a deterministic manner on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Once a smart contract is successfully deployed, its code cannot be altered.

Smart contracts are only executed when called by transactions. Outside of transaction calls, they remain dormant without any automatic background execution.

 

Any individual can create a smart contract. Through smart contracts, developers build complex decentralized applications that provide services to users, such as decentralized exchanges (DEX), trading platforms, games, social tools, and more.