Who Created the Ethereum Ecosystem?
Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian entrepreneur and programmer from Toronto, envisioned second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum when he was 19 years old.
In 2011, the year Buterin first grew interested in Bitcoin, Buterin co-founded the online news website Bitcoin Magazine, writing hundreds of articles on the cryptocurrency world. He went on to code for the privacy-minded Dark Wallet and the marketplace Egora.
Along this journey, he came up with the idea for the Ethereum ecosystem, a platform inspired by Bitcoin that could go beyond the financial use cases.
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He released a white paper in 2013 describing an alternative platform designed for any type of decentralized application developers would want to build. Many developers were drawn to this idea of creating decentralized applications because they would be accessible to a global audience, be free from censorship and would give users more control over their data than most apps, which have intermediaries in the middle managing users’ finances and data.
To accomplish this, Ethereum makes it easy to create smart contracts, or code that automatically creates an outcome when certain conditions are met. For his work, Buterin was named a 2014 Thiel fellow, winning a $100,000 grant to work on Ethereum.
Buterin FAQs
Who helped Buterin create Ethereum?
After Buterin unveiled the Ethereum white paper, several other developers joined the ranks including CEO of IOG Charles Hoskinson, Decentral CEO Anthony Di Iorio and Akasha Founder Mihai Alisie. Buterin also introduced two new co-founders to the team:
Co-founder Dr. Gavin Wood did much of the early programming and architecting of the platform. He wrote the Ethereum yellow paper, the “technical bible” that outlines the specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is responsible for handling the state of the ledger and runs smart contracts.
Co-founder Joseph Lubin went on to found the Brooklyn-based ConsenSys, a startup that focuses on building decentralized apps.
How much money does Buterin have?
Since Ethereum data and transaction information is public, users can track how much money Buterin has stored in ether, Ethereum’s native token.
Buterin’s main address is this one, which shows that he owns 333,348 ether, worth approximately $568 million at the time this article was published.
What was Ethereum like in its early days?
To get the project off the ground, Buterin and the other founders launched a crowdfunding campaign in July 2014 where participants purchased ether, the Ethereum tokens that function as shares in the project.
Raising more than $18 million, it was the most successful crowd sale at that time. It took another year, but the first live release, Frontier, launched on 30th July, 2015. It wasn’t a particularly attractive platform, but the command line interface offered developers a platform for creating their own decentralized apps.
The smart contract platform took off, swelling into today’s ecosystem of hundreds of developers and even drawing the attention of tech giants like IBM and Microsoft.
Poolin launches Ethereum hash rate token worth $30 million
Chinese crypto mining pool Poolin has rolled out an Ethereum hash rate-backed token initially worth $30 million in its bid to lower down the entrance barrier for retail investors.
The firm said in a blog post on Wednesday that each unit of the so-called pETH18C ERC-20 token represents 1 megahashes per second (MH/s) of computing power on Ethash that’s running on Poolin’s facilities with a power efficiency of 1.8 watt per MH/s.
The move comes amid an increasing level of difficulty for retail investors to participate in the crypto mining space due to what appears to be an unprecedented chip shortage at a global scale that has been having a ripple effect beyond crypto mining.
Poolin said it is selling 1 million pETH18C tokens at a preset price of $30 in USDT with the proceeds to reimburse the cost it prepaid for the mining equipment that’s powering up the hash rate.
In total, the tokens represent 1 terahashes second (TH/s) of hashing power on Ethereum, which accounts for 0.2% of the network’s total. As of press time, users had bought over a quarter of the supply in two hours since it went live.
The initial price of $30 factors in the base cost of Ethereum miners per 1 MH/s, Poolin’s one percent fee as well as a set electricity cost of $0.0750 per kWh.
In a similar fashion to Poolin’s recent issuance of 200,000 units of bitcoin hash rate token pBTC35A, the pETH18C can be staked to Poolin’s Mars Protocol to directly mine ETH proportionate to the underlying hash rate.
Poolin said it has no plan for a second batch at this stage as the supply of Ethereum mining equipment is running dry, as The Block reported previously.
The Bull And Bear Case For Ethereum (Cryptocurrency:ETH-USD)
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