Ethereum Price

Ethereum is a programmable blockchain. Where Bitcoin records transfers of a single currency, Ethereum runs arbitrary code, which means applications — lending markets, exchanges, games, identity systems — can operate without a company hosting them.

The whitepaper, published by Vitalik Buterin in 2013, framed the goal plainly: an alternative protocol for building decentralised applications, with a built-in Turing-complete programming language. The network went live on 30 July 2015.

The core difference from Bitcoin is architectural. Bitcoin tracks unspent outputs; Ethereum keeps accounts with balances and, in the case of contract accounts, persistent storage and executable code. Send a transaction to a contract address and the network runs that code, updating state according to its logic.

Execution costs gas. Every operation has a price, and the fee you pay is gas used multiplied by a price set by demand. This exists to stop infinite loops and to ration a shared resource — without it, one badly written contract could consume the network.

Ethereum secured itself with mining until September 2022, when it switched to proof of stake. Validators now put up 32 ETH each, and misbehaviour is punished by destroying part of that stake rather than by wasting electricity. The change cut the network's energy use dramatically and reduced how much new ETH must be issued to pay for security.

There is no supply cap. Issuance is designed to be as low as security allows rather than fixed in advance, and part of every transaction fee is destroyed, so total supply can shrink during periods of heavy use.

Blocks are produced in twelve-second slots, with thirty-two slots forming an epoch. Most activity has migrated to layer 2 networks that batch transactions and post compressed data back to Ethereum — an intentional strategy in which the base layer provides security and settlement while throughput is handled above it.