As Russia invaded Ukraine, global markets shook and cryptocurrencies plummeted resulting in investors seeking refuge in safe-haven assets. With a 24-hour trading volume of $7,928,778,055 USD, the current Ethereum price is $2,631.16 USD. The ETH to USD pricing is updated in real-time.
In the previous 24 hours, Ethereum has lost 0.55 percent of its value. With a live market cap of $315,341,209,038 USD, Bitcoin is now ranked #2 on CoinMarketCap. The maximum supply is not known, however, it has a circulating supply of 119,848,786 ETH tokens.
If you're looking for a place to buy Ethereum, Binance, OKX, CoinFLEX, BitCoke, and Bitget are now the best cryptocurrency exchanges for trading Ethereum stock.
What Is Ethereum (ETH)?
With its own cryptocurrency called Ether, Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain technology. Decentralized smart contract execution and a range of various cryptocurrencies can be executed on the Ethereum platform. However, heavy transaction fees have plagued the Ethereum network, and it has frequently buckled under high demand seasons. The network's average transaction cost peaked at $71.72 in May 2021.
In 2013, Vitalik Buterin published a whitepaper introducing Ethereum. A public crowd sale was held in the summer of 2014, during which Buterin and his co-founders raised money for the initiative. The ICO raised $18.3 million in Bitcoin and over 60 million Ether at a price of $0.311 during which the project's initial coin offering (ICO) was held. Since the summer of 2014, an investment in Ethereum has yielded an annualized ROI of almost 270 percent at the current price.
On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum Foundation formally debuted the blockchain as a prototype nicknamed "Frontier." Since then, many network updates have occurred: "Constantinople" on February 28, 2019, "Istanbul" on December 8, 2019, "Muir Glacier" on January 2, 2020, "Berlin" on April 14, 2021, and most recently, the "London" hard fork on August 5, 2021.
Decentralized programs that are censorship-resistant, downtime-resistant, and fraud-resistant are the declared goals of Ethereum, which aims to establish a worldwide platform for decentralized applications.
Who Are Ethereum's Original Inventors?
In total, Ethereum has eight co-founders, which is a large number for a cryptocurrency project. On June 7, 2014, they first met in Zug, Switzerland.
The best-known of the lot is Russian-Canadian Vitalik Buterin. His 2013 white paper on Ethereum was the first to describe the technology, and he continues to improve it today. After co-founding and writing for Bitcoin Magazine, Buterin established ETH.
Gavin Wood, a British programmer and was the first chief technology officer of the Ethereum Foundation. He is probably the second-most important co-founder of ETH because he wrote the first technical implementation of Ethereum in the C++ programming language, proposed Ethereum's native programming language Solidity. Before Ethereum, Wood worked as a Microsoft researcher. Subsequently, he went on to start the Web3 Foundation.
Anthony Di Iorio, who underwrote the project in its early stages, is another Ethereum co-founder. Charles Hoskinson, founded the Ethereum Foundation and its legal structure in Switzerland. As part of the Ethereum Foundation's establishment, Mihai Alisie provided support for the organisation. In addition to Di Iorio, Joseph Lubin launched ConsenSys, a startup incubator for Ethereum-based businesses, after he helped fund Ethereum in its early days. Amir Chetrit, a co-founder of Ethereum left the project early on.
What Makes Ethereum Special?
The Ethereum blockchain smart contract platform is the first of its kind. In a smart contract, the actions required to complete an agreement between several parties on the internet are automatically carried out by computer programs written to carry out those actions. To lower transaction costs and increase transaction reliability, they were meant to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries between contractors.
In order to make use of the advantages of smart contracts, Ethereum created a framework that allowed it to execute smart contracts on a blockchain. Gavin Wood, one of Ethereum's co-founders, said the blockchain was created as a "one computer for the entire globe," theoretically capable of making any software more durable, censorship-resistant, and less prone to fraud by running on a globally dispersed network of public nodes.
With the ERC-20 compatibility standard, Ethereum's blockchain may also house additional cryptocurrencies, known as "tokens," in addition to smart contracts on the Ethereum network. As of this writing, more than 280,000 ERC-20-compliant tokens have been released on the Ethereum network. For example, USDT, LINK, and BNB are all in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by marketcapitalization. Since the launch of Play2Earn games, the ETH to PHP exchange rate has seen a significant spike in attention.
Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0, due in 2022, will implement proof-of-stake consensus. Switching to sharding as a scalability solution and a new consensus method has been on the Ethereum roadmap since the network's creation. Smart contracts on other chains will be settled on the Beacon Chain, which is the current Ethereum chain.
Ethereum's Arrow Glacier update was postponed until June 2022 at the end of 2021. Until then, Vitalik Buterin anticipates the network's endgame to be determined by optimistic rollups and Zk-rollups.
How secure is the Ethereum network?
The Ethash proof-of-work algorithm, which is part of the Keccak family of hash functions, will be used to secure Ethereum as of August 2020.
However, a proof-of-stake mechanism will be implemented as part of Ethereum 2.0, which is scheduled to launch in late 2022.
In December 2020, when the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain (Phase 0) became live, Ethereum 2.0 staking became possible. In order to activate validator software on Ethereum 2.0, you must deposit 32 ETH in order to activate the deposit contract. Depositing ETH constitutes an Ethereum stake and helps to secure the network by storing data, processing transactions, and adding new blocks to the blockchain. The beta version of Ethereum 2.0 is presently available for download.
It's feasible to acquire Ethereum or use ETH trading pairs on practically all of the main crypto exchanges because Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrencyin the crypto marketafter Bitcoin.