Ethereum Fun Facts For Beginners

What is Ethereum?

According to their official website:
Ethereum is the community-run technology powering the cryptocurrency, ether (ETH) and thousands of decentralized applications

According to Wikipedia:
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform.

You've probably seen photos of this man, Vitalik Buterin, floating around if you've researched Ethereum even at a surface level.

Vitalik is the co-founder of and original developer of Ethereum and to be honest, he's basically the face of Ethereum.

Vitalik has been involved in the Bitcoin community since 2011 and was just 21 years old when Ethereum was launched.

He currently has an estimated net worth of between 400-500 million.

Currently, Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap with a market cap at the time of this writing of 200 billion.

For reference, Bitcoin has a market cap of just under 1 trillion. Additionally, the closest market cap under Ethereum is a handful of coins in the 30 billion area. It's safe to say Ethereum is safely in second place.

Many speculate that at some Bitcoin will no longer be the largest coin in the world and if any coin can dethrone it, Ethereum seems the likely candidate.

The Ethereum technology has spawned thousands of Ethereum tokens.

These tokens have their own communities, use cases, market caps, prices and investment metrics. 

All the tokens piggy-back off the Ethereum network and cost "gas" to be transferred on the network.

If you own some coins/tokens of another project, there's a good chance they are Ethereum tokens at their core.

Ethereum suffered an unfortunate blemish when the DAO (an Ethereum crowdfunded token that crowdfunded millions) was hacked and an unknown person exploited a vulnerability that allowed him/her to steal 1/3rd of the DAO's funds.

Because of this, the Ethereum community made a decision to hard fork (and roll back) the blockchain to restore the funds. This was (and still is, to many) controversial as many in the crypto community believe a decentralized ledger should never be blemished with a reversal.

From this controversial decision, Ethereum Class (ETC) was formed that maintains the original, unaltered Ethereum network. Ethereum classic is still around to this day.

In early 2021, Ethereum achieved a price of over $2000 per coin after initially being worth less than a dollar in 2015. This, combined with its longevity has made it one of the most successful cryptos of all time (duh).

Ethereum is the network, not the cryptocurrency unit. "Ether" is the token you can buy and sell, although the terms are frequently used interchangeably.

For instance if you wanted to buy some, you would be buying "Ether".