Ethereum (ETH)

While Bitcoin is revered as the pioneer of cryptocurrencies that built a legacy of its own and launched a whole industry of innovation through Blockchain technology, it still remained limited in its application and practical implementation. Then came Ethereum, which opened the doors of the locked hurdles, unleashed the true potential of the application of cryptocurrencies and opened the world’s eyes to what Cryptocurrency is set to achieve.

Ethereum is an open-source, public Blockchain platform that is decentralized and gives room for independent companies to build their own decentralized applications and cryptocurrency tokens on its platform. Those cryptocurrencies are then known as ERC-20 tokens. Ethereum builds smart contracts and stores information on a network of international nodes. A cryptocurrency known as Ether is used to pay network nodes in order to process transactions (Chinchilla, 2019).

Ethereum technology is well-developed and has been reported to have made quite an impression as it is already widely used around the world. More and more decentralized apps are being built on the network platform with each passing day. The language used for the coding and programming of many DApps (decentralized applications) is Solidity and the creators have the option to implement smart contracts on their apps.The language Solidity is developed particularly to improve the smart contracts from a security point of view (Solidity, 2018).

Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, who has made his mark in the cryptocurrency and Blockchain community as an enthusiast and a promoter. He is very well-respected within the crypto-community and has promoted the understanding and overall knowledge of cryptocurrencies through his undying efforts of contributing to different blog posts and forums. He also founded the Bitcoin Magazine in May 2012 in order to enhance awareness of the general public towards the use of cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technology (Snyder, 2017).

The team consists of well-chosen figures who are experts in their own field and which complement each other also. The CEO of the company is Vitalik Buterin.

The code is developed by the Ethereum team who constantly publishes new updates and upgrades of the Ethereum network. The activity can be tracked on their GitHub profile. The focus these days is on the latest upgrade of the Ethereum network known as Constantinople. The upgrade will be released soon and will considerably improve the speed of the transactions while consuming way lesser energy (Chinchilla, 2019).

With the ongoing level of development by the Ethereum team, it is likely that the team will overcome the hurdles that have been hindering the use of the technology to be used efficiently. The limitation mainly occurs in the shape of limited TPS that is allowed on the network.

The technology, however, will probably remain as the leading platform for the development of decentralized applications and will grow at a steady rate as smart contracts get more interesting and usable for people and businesses.

The most important project in Ethereum’s pipeline currently is the Constantinople upgrade. The upgrade, expectedly, will enhance the performance of the network by increasing the transactional capacity of the network and minimizing the energy demands of the processes.

Ethereum holds exceptional growth potential. With an already well-developed platform and a large number of users, Ethereum could be the sole base for building decentralized applications in the future. The attraction of smart contracts will prove to be very beneficial to the Ethereum network once the technology starts to become mature (Jameson, 2019).

Ethereum has previously announced that it will be rolling out an upgraded version of the Ethereum Blockchain platform. They have named the upgrade Constantinople. However, the release was recently delayed because the team noticed some serious security concerning bugs in the design of the platform (Jameson, 2019).

Another major fact regarding the Ethereum network is that the network was bottlenecked due to an influx of transactions. In December 2017, the user activity on the decentralized app ‘CryptoKitties’ increased to such extent that the whole Ethereum network faced delayed transactions and reduced speed (Cheng, 2017).

The Ethereum community is perhaps the largest community in the crypto-world. It is also one of the most active ones, where community members frequently contribute to the development of the technology. They promote news and publicize any new development regarding Ethereum on different social media platforms. To put things into perspective, the Ethereum subreddit (Part of the Reddit Forum) has over 400,000 subscribers.

Ethereum has captured a huge portion of the business community already. Almost every decentralized app (DApp) is built on Ethereum technology. An alliance is known as ‘Ethereum Alliance’ is a composition of around 200 big companies, which include, but are not limited to, MasterCard, Credit Suisse, UBS, Microsoft and Intel (Sharma, 2019).

Shortly after Ethereum was launched as an open-source platform, many well-known substitutes have emerged in the market that all claim to offer the same level of performance, if not better. However, Ethereum still remains the most popular platform for decentralized applications that offers smart contracts as well.