What is Ethereum?
Ethereum is the name of a type of digital asset that also operates on peer-to-peer technology like Bitcoin. Ethereum’s decentralized platform was created specifically to be used as a place to store, deploy, and explain smart contracts. Through the Ethereum platform, developers can create new forms of market, store important data such as cooperation agreements, debts, company deeds, etc., and send money wherever and whenever they want without having to rely on third parties.
Ethereum intends to provide an alternative protocol for building dApps and provides a different set of tradeoffs that will be useful for building a large number of dAPPs, taking development time, security and interoperability into account. ETH achieves this by building a blockchain with a built-in-Turing-complete programming language, allowing anyone to write smart contracts and dApps in a few lines of code and create their own rules for ownership, transaction format, and state transition functions.
Ethereum has a total of eight co-founders — an astonishingly large number for a crypto project. They first met on June 7, 2014, in Zug, Switzerland.
The Russian-Canadian Vitalik Buterin is perhaps the most famous of the bunch. He wrote the original white paper that first described ETH in 2013 and is still working on improving the platform to this day. Prior to ETH, Buterin co-founded and wrote for the news website Bitcoin Magazine.
British programmer Gavin Wood is arguably the second most important co-founder of ETH, as he coded Ethereum’s first technical implementation in the C++ programming language, proposed Ethereum’s native programming language, Solidity, and was the first chief technology officer of the ETH Foundation. Prior to Ethereum, Wood was a research scientist at Microsoft. After that, he went on to establish the Web3 Foundation.
Among the other Ethereum founders are: – Anthony Di Iorio, who undertook the project during the early stages of its development. – Charles Hoskinson, who played a major role in founding the Swiss-based Ethereum Foundation and its legal framework. – Mihai Alisie, who provided assistance in establishing the Ethereum Foundation. – Joseph Lubin, a Canadian entrepreneur, who, like Di Iorio, had helped fund ETH during its early days, and later founded an incubator for an ETH-based startup called ConsenSys. – Amir Chetrit, who helped found Ethereum but stayed away from it early in development.
