Ethereum(ETH) Price

Ethereum was proposed in 2013 and officially launched in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, along with co-founders including Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin. The goal was to expand upon Bitcoin’s concept by building a blockchain that supports more than just peer-to-peer payments, enabling self-executing contracts and a decentralized app ecosystem.

Ethereum Virtual Machine - At the heart of Ethereum is the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), a decentralized computation engine that executes smart contracts across thousands of nodes. It ensures that applications run exactly as programmed, without downtime or interference.

Smart Contracts - Smart contracts are self-executing agreements coded directly onto the blockchain. These allow Ethereum to automate financial agreements, NFT ownership, governance mechanisms, and much more.

Decentralized Consensus - Ethereum transitioned from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) in September 2022 through a major upgrade called The Merge. This switch significantly reduced energy consumption and changed how blocks are validated - from miners to validators who stake ETH.

Ethereum is continuously evolving through a series of upgrades collectively referred to as Ethereum 2.0, aimed at improving scalability, security, and energy efficiency. The most transformative of these was The Merge, which took place in September 2022. This upgrade transitioned Ethereum’s consensus mechanism from energy-intensive Proof of Work (PoW) to the more sustainable Proof of Stake (PoS). By replacing miners with validators who stake ETH to secure the network, Ethereum significantly reduced its carbon footprint and laid the foundation for future scalability improvements.

Following The Merge, the Shanghai Upgrade in 2023 introduced the long-awaited feature of staking withdrawals, allowing validators to access their staked ETH and earned rewards. Looking ahead, Ethereum plans to implement sharding, a technique that will divide the blockchain into smaller, parallel chains known as shards. This will dramatically increase the network’s capacity to process transactions and reduce congestion, making Ethereum more scalable and cost-efficient for global users and developers.

Ethereum’s flexible smart contract architecture has enabled it to become the leading platform for decentralized applications (dApps). One of the most prominent use cases is Decentralized Finance (DeFi) which allows users to trade, lend, borrow, and earn yield without traditional intermediaries. Ethereum is also the home of the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) boom in which where artists and creators tokenize unique digital assets.

In addition to finance and collectibles, Ethereum supports the rise of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) - community-led entities that operate via transparent governance rules encoded in smart contracts. These organizations allow participants to vote and make decisions without centralized leadership. Furthermore, Ethereum enables stablecoins like USDC and DAI to operate seamlessly on-chain, providing price stability and a critical bridge between traditional and crypto economies.

Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum does not have a fixed supply limit. However, ETH issuance has changed dramatically after The Merge. The PoS model, combined with EIP-1559 (a fee-burning mechanism), often results in net-deflationary supply behavior when network usage is high. ETH is used to pay for transaction and gas fees, participate in staking to secure the network, and serve as collateral in DeFi applications.