With a market cap of $198 billion, Ethereum is the second largest blockchain network in the world. It hosts nearly 6,000 decentralised apps (DApps) and functions as the base infrastructure for several crypto trading platforms, DeFi protocols and NFT marketplaces.
However, despite its mainstream popularity, there are several finer details about Ethereum that very few people know about. Tag along as we uncover some of these little-known facts and give you a better understanding of the world’s first smart contract network.
Ethereum was crowdfunded
Ethereum is the brainchild of Vitalik Buterin, who created the network’s whitepaper in 2013. Back then, Buterin did not have the funds to commence developments and had to reach out for finance. However, instead of turning to venture capital firms, he and his co-founders decided to go down the crowdfunding route, a mode of finance that was popular among artists and social entrepreneurship projects at the time. The crowdfunding campaign was a huge success. Buterin collected the required funds in just a couple of months (July and August 2014), and the Ethereum project was finally launched on 30 July 2015.
Testnets named after metro stations
Test networks (testnets) are backup blockchains. They are used to test changes and updates before they go live on the main network. Ethereum has 5 testnets, namely Sepolia, Goerli, Ropsten, Rinkeby and Kovan. Interestingly, these testnets are named after metro and train stations worldwide. Kovan is an MRT station in Singapore, Rinkeby and Ropsten are stations on the blue and red lines of the Stockholm metro, respectively, Sepolia is a stop on the Athens Metro Line 2, and finally, Goerli was named after a train station in Berlin.
Ethereum is divisible up to 18 decimal points
When Ethereum was launched in 2015, its native cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH), sold for a fraction of a dollar. Today, nearly a decade later, 1 ETH is valued at over $1,600; this is much lower than its all-time high of more than $4,800.
If the token’s growth over the past few years indicates future valuations, owning even a single ETH would be out of reach for several investors. Keeping this in mind, the development team has allowed ETH to be divisible by up to 18 decimal points.
This ensures that, even if prices rise in the future, users can still purchase a fraction of a coin. The smallest denomination of ether is known as a gwei, with 1 ETH equaling 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 gwei.
The current version of Ethereum is not the original
The Ethereum we know today is a hard fork that came into existence in 2016. The original version of the blockchain is called Ethereum Classic and is still running today. The split occurred due to the hack of the DAO, an investor-directed venture capital firm for Ethereum investors. However, after raising more than $150 million worth of ether (ETH), the DAO was hacked due to vulnerabilities in its code base.
After the hack, the Ethereum community was divided into two groups. A small group of developers and miners believed that DAO investors should suffer the consequences of investing in a flawed project. However, a larger group wanted to roll back the blockchain, effectively creating a bailout for DAO investors.
In a controversial decision, Ethereum was hard forked to restore all the stolen funds. Those who did not agree with the change in Ethereum’s protocol stayed with the old Ethereum blockchain, and it got a new name – Ethereum Classic.
The forked-out chain went by the name of Ethereum and emerged as the more popular chain among the two. Ethereum Classic has a fixed supply, while Ethereum’s supply is infinite.
Only one co-founder is still directly working on the platform
The Ethereum project had eight co-founders: Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Amir Chetrit, Charles Hoskinson (the original 5 Ethereum co-founders), Gavin Wood, Jeffrey Wilcke, and Joseph Lubin. Now, only Buterin is actively working for the Ethereum blockchain. Charles Hoskinson and Gavin Wood have founded new blockchain networks, Cardano and Polkadot, considered Ethereum rivals. Anthony Di Iorio, who ran a blockchain-focused software company Decentral in Toronto, quit Ethereum last year, citing personal security risks. The other co-founders are engaged in different industries.
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