Although investors buy and sell thousands of different cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and Ethereum account for almost two-thirds of the entire global cryptocurrency market, which amounts to more than two trillion dollars. The former is undoubtedly very popular, but the latter has gained so much ground that its price has more than quadrupled in the past year.
Ethereum is currently the second-largest digital currency by market value. The timeline of its beginnings details that in 2013 Vitalik Buterin, a 27-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer released a white paper outlining the basics of Ethereum. In 2014 his other co-founders funded Ethereum through an ICO that raised more than $18 million. And in 2015 Ethereum was first launched and named Frontier.
This cryptocurrency focuses on managing application program code. Additionally, people who work mining Ethereum, receive Ether, which is used as a means of payment for services that use the program.
And although Ethereum is second only to Bitcoin, there are differences between the two that make the future of this platform and its token more promising. For example, Ethereum has several software developers building applications on its network. Ether is nothing more than Ethereum’s native blockchain token.
Ethereum is home to many of the most interesting, and sometimes puzzling, developments in what appears to be the development of a global financial infrastructure that moves behind the backs of and independent of governments and international financial institutions.
Moreover, Ether is more than a cryptocurrency, as it is used to transact non fungible tokens (NFT), a technology that allows virtual objects such as works of art or sporting moves to be bought and sold and auctioned for sidereal sums. For example, the first tweet by Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter that was sold for US$ 2.9 billion.
Ethereum also paid attention to the negative comments made about the crypto world and focused on the “carbon footprint” left by its operations due to the huge energy consumption needed to mine the tokens and process transactions.
This cryptocurrency is used for computer services based on dApps and smart contracts which saves money and time by eliminating intermediaries, third party brokers and inefficient monopolies such as large companies or government authorities.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) works as a “world computer” with many nodes, and uses several programming languages, such as C++, Python, Ruby, Go and Java. And it relies on a specialized language called Solidity to write smart contracts.
Many people who want to buy Ethereum today do so through brokers, and this is indeed an excellent place to start. There are many options available for those looking to do so for the first time.
A first step is to set up a trading account for free, for example, at eToro, with name, an email address and a phone number; then you choose your preferred payment method and activate the account with the minimum deposit into your account.
To start trading you choose a cryptocurrency by clicking on “Trading Markets” – then set your risk limit, and click “Start” to make your first investment. You can buy Ethereum with PayPal, with cash, with bank transfer and with credit or debit cards.
With a future of great optimism, experts on the subject estimate that the behavior of Ethereum has a greater potential, for being qualified as a cryptocurrency of great value by offering a platform for the creation of Dapps.