Ethereum
Ethereum
If you’re interested in Ethereum or you’re already investing in it, you might be wondering whether now is a good time to buy. It’s always exciting to ride a hot investment, but there’s also the temptation to wait for a dip first.
ETH Price Statistics
| Ethereum Price | $3,404.15 |
|---|---|
| Trading Volume24h | $18,996,685,581.00 17.27% |
| Volume / Market Cap | 0.04748 |
| Market Dominance | 18.88% |
| Market Rank | #2 |
Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. In 2014, development work commenced and was crowdfunded, and the network went live on 30 July 2015. The platform allows anyone to deploy permanent and immutable decentralized applications onto it, with which users can interact. Therefore, decentralized finance (Defi) applications provide a broad array of financial services without the need for intermediaries like brokerages, or banks. They allow cryptocurrency users to borrow against their holdings or lend them out for interest. Ethereum also allows for the creation and exchange of NFTs. They are non-interchangeable tokens connected to digital works of art or other real-world items and sold as unique digital property.
How Ethereum works
Like Bitcoin, Ethereum has its own blockchain where a global network of over 2.4 million computers known as “nodes” maintains a record of transactions. Anyone can run an Ethereum node and participate in validating the network provided they have the right hardware, knowledge and time to commit to it.
There are three main types of nodes that operate on the Ethereum network.
An easy way to understand the difference between miners and full nodes is to think of miners as archaeologists out in the field uncovering historical artefacts and full nodes as administrators at a national museum that maintain a record of all their findings.
For instance, the main difference between a full node and a full archive node is that a full archive node does everything a full node does but also compiles an archive of all previous states.
Ethereum token standards
The token standards are the blueprints for creating tokens that are compatible with the broader Ethereum network. Additionally, these include tokens that can be traded for one another (fungible) as well as tokens that are inherently unique and cannot be mutually exchanged (non-fungible tokens, aka NFTs). Furthermore, the token standards were invented by the developers to help users create new digital currencies easier, faster and cheaper than starting from scratch.
