Exchange Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum is a community-driven decentralized open-source blockchain system with its own cryptocurrency — Ether. The platform opens access to digital money and other data-friendly services for everyone. Moreover, it works as a base for numerous cryptocurrencies and for the execution of the smart contract. It is also a peer-to-peer network that allows moving the funds or making agreements directly with another user without an intermediary.

The vision of the project is to become a number-one platform in the world for decentralized applications and smart contracts, so anyone can write and run software without censorship, downtime, and fraud. In fact, no company or person has control over Ethereum. It was built on Bitcoin innovation but with significant changes. For instance, it is programmable, allowing the users to utilize numerous digital assets. According to Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, the platform was designed to become a “one computer for the entire planet”, allowing to make any program more robust, censorship-resistant, and less prone to fraud thanks to running on a globally distributed network of public nodes. 

The Ethereum network also offers an ERC-20 compatibility standard that allows Ethereum to host other cryptocurrencies. So far, it has been the most used feature of the network as since the launch date over 2800 tokens were deployed using this standard. Around 40 of those assets are in the top-100 cryptos by market capitalization. 

Ethereum became a home for digital money, electronic payments, and applications. Today it hosts thousands of applications that can be securely used by anyone without revealing personal details. Its use cases include DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs. 

The idea of Ethereum was first described in a WhitePaper written by Vitalik Buterin in 2013. Together with other 6 co-founders, he secured the project funding in an online public crowd sale during the summer of 2014, which brought them around $18 million worth of Bitcoin. At the time of ICO, the price of 1 Ether was $0.311 with more than 60 million tokens sold. 

The Ethereum network was officially launched on July 30, 2015, under the “Frontier” prototype. Since that time the network has undergone several updates. The most recent one was the “London” hard fork that happened on August 5, 2021.

Ethereum has brought the concept of a blockchain smart contracts platform into the world. The programs that automatically perform necessary actions to fulfill the agreement between several parties are considered smart contracts. They allow avoiding the need for trusted intermediaries between the contractors and also decrease the transactions price while improving the reliability of the transactions. 

At the same time, Ethereum has been suffering from high gas prices and scalability issues. To overcome those complications the network is to be transferred from the Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. It will also add new features to Ethereum. The switch has been delayed to June 2022. 

London Hard Fork, which went live in August 2021 as a step in the process of transition to Ethereum 2.0, included five Ethereum Improvement Proposals. EIP-1559 is the most notable of them. It changes the way gas fees are estimated on the platform — instead of the open auction where the highest bidder wins, EIP-1559 sets the base fee that changes depending on the network's congestion. The users also got a chance to make a specific transaction faster by paying a priority fee. Part of every transaction fee is burned and removed from circulation. 

Ethereum s the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and users can swap or exchange Ethereum tokens on almost all the centralized and decentralized platforms, including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKEx, and others.