What is Ethereum?

Ethereum is an open-source cryptographic blockchain technology that runs on smart contracts, nodes, and EVM capabilities and can be said to be a decentralized blockchain for protocol hosting.

Ethereum has been the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization since 2016, founded by “Vitalik Buterin” in 2013 at the age of 19 and published its white paper that same year. In 2014 Ethereum had its crowdfunding and raised $18 Million by selling its first native token “Ether” and launching its first (Ethereum 1.0) token and mining Dapp on July 30, 2015. 

In the year 2016 Ethereum developed the first DAO to raise funds for its network issue but unfortunately, the network was manipulated and exploited by its member which caused a bug in its smart contract, bringing to a decision of the Ethereum hard fork to salvage the stolen funds, eventually, most of the Ethereum DAO members out-ruled the decision and decided to create a new Decentralized application(Dapp) know as the Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum suffered a large number of attacks at its early stage which includes the Denial-Of-Service(DoS) in 2016 and under-go different upgrades such as the “Spurious Dragon“, “Tangerine Whistle“, “Metropolis“, “Byzantium” and “Constantinople” which brought to the Ethereum Improvement Protocol(EIP) to address its security, gas-fees issues, scalability, and privacy issues. This solved most of its scaling and comprehensive challenges and brought futures such as the Zk-Snarks, laying a foundation for the transition from Proof of Work(PoW) blockchain to Proof of Stake(PoS), which will significantly lower the validation energy consumption of the network.

The Ethereum ecosystem has different Layers, protocols, Dapps, DeFi protocols, and DAO networks built and hosted on it, this makes it the leading blockchain.

Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0 excursion started in January 2017 to implement a shard chain that solves its high volume challenges and efficiency for developers and users, the proof of stake(PoS) implementation is envisioned to reduce its high gas fees and boost fast transactions, this has been in the radar for year’s and so many reports has been written regarding its release which is said to be in 2023. 

The Ethereum Token Standards

Token standards are ways in which we identify a particular token depending on blockchains, there are multiple types of token standards on Ethereum each with a special framework.

1. The (ERC-20) token is referred to as virtual currency or coin, it represents the primary function of the Ethereum network, dapp staking, on-chain voting, and other tokenized functions.
2. The (ERC-1155) is the used standard for Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and can be used on smart contract trades.
3. The (ERC-721) is a token standard used for art or musical framework on the Ethereum blockchain which is also regarded as Non-Fungible.
4. The (ERC-777) is a standard that sets the interface for a tokens contract, such as a mixer contract for improved transaction interaction.
5. The (ERC-223) represents an internal function to prevent token loss and can be referred to as a smart contract callback token.
6. The (ERC-1337) represents the Software-as-a-Service(SaaS) for on-Chain subscription purposes.

The Qualities of Ethereum.

Ethereum has a constantly running nude on the blockchain software to keep the network active and maintain the state of the blockchain while confirming transactions through the consensus algorithm, for an application to run on Ethereum it requires a connection to the Node to interact with the application thereby function call for data recording and transactions updates. 

Ethereum blockchain is the leading blockchain network after bitcoin with a mega community and developers building on the network, due to its high security and open-source blockchain activity and visibility, all transactions on the blockchain are visible which can be seen on the Ethereum gas tracker web application.

There are several Ethereum-compatible wallets, but metamask is the first Ethereum-based decentralized application wallet for all technical blockchain user interaction, described as a non-custodial wallet, users can store tokens, and interact with another blockchain Decentralized application(Dapp), buy, and store NFT on the wallet. 

Conclusion

The development of Ethereum will constantly scale with the new 2.0 features and standards, it will change the full aspect of Web 3.0 development. Ethereum can be purchased in any centralized exchange.