At present, the entire world knows about very well about Bitcoin (BTC). People know it because of its founder “Satoshi Nakamoto”, who is considered as one of the biggest mysteries of modern day technology. Bitcoin is known for being the first-ever cryptocurrency to have been introduced in the cryptocurrency sector, thus, laying foundation for the cryptocurrency industry. Lastly, the world knows Bitcoin for being the largest cryptocurrency in the entire crypto-verse in terms of market price and capitalization.
Ever since the advent of the cryptocurrency industry Bitcoin has been the headliner and people from around the world know very well about it. However, in the year 2020, people came to know about other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH). If you are new to the cryptocurrency industry, then you may have an idea about Ethereum. You may know that it is mined and it is the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin.
However, you may not know exactly what Ethereum is capable of and what kind of role it has played in the advancement of the cryptocurrency industry. Let me enlighten you a bit about Ethereum and its role in the advancement of cryptocurrency industry.
Foundation of Ethereum
Ethereum was introduced into the crypto-verse, six years after the launch of Bitcoin. At that time, only a handful of cryptocurrencies were launched and not much was known around the capabilities of the crypto-blockchain technology. However, the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, a Bitcoin proponent wanted the largest cryptocurrency to do more than just being mined and then be traded.
He criticized the existence of Bitcoin for just being a typical cryptocurrency and not being able to offer much to the cryptocurrency industry. Therefore, he went ahead and proposed a whitepaper for a new cryptocurrency blockchain called Ethereum. He proposed that the blockchain would not only serve as a platform for a native token Ether (ETH), but it would also offer much more than that. As per him, Ethereum would offer people the chance to perform trades, develop/create their own tokens, and develop decentralized applications (DApps).
Therefore, after receiving great reception from public and the cryptocurrency community in the form of public funding in 2014, Ethereum was officially launched in the mid of 2015.
Crypto-Verse after Ethereum’s Launch
The foundation of Ethereum worked liked a charm and laid the foundation of a new era for the cryptocurrency industry within a decade. Since then, more than 200,000 different tokens have been launched by different developers. Many developers have even introduced several decentralized applications (DApps) and more products are being introduced in the crypto-verse through ETH blockchain.
Issues Faced by Ethereum after Tremendous Adoption
As the year 2020 came towards the end of its third quarter, the cryptocurrency industry came towards mainstream adoption. This saw that Ethereum went to the very top right below Bitcoin. The only thing that kept it from hitting the top spot was a humongous crowd that had started piling up on its protocol. In later 2020, ETH gained so much public attention that millions of users moved to this platform. According to stats, more than 150 million unique wallet addresses are just for ETH. This means that even half of these wallets would equal to 75 million users, if half of them were active.
As a result, Ethereum ended up facing huge transaction latency, delay, failure, and high fee issues. On the other hand, Bitcoin did not face such issues because it had a typical and most basic blockchain system with no extra features to offer.
What Solution did Ethereum Come up with?
Since then, Ethereum has come up with a solution in order to increase its scalability, which would solve all such problems faced by the ETH users. However, there is one bad news for the ETH users, which is that once Ethereum developers launch its second-layer solution, it would act as a hard fork. This means that the previous protocol would be nullified and Eth2.0 would take its place. Therefore, the users on old ETH blockchain would have to move to the new blockchain.
Ever since ETH’s launch, it has been operating on the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol. However, the Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2.0) version would be launched as proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol.
