Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency blockchain network in the world behind Bitcoin. It’s a community-built network under the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today. It’s known as “the world’s programmable blockchain.”
Ethereum allows you to move money, or create interactions, directly with someone else through smart contracts. You don’t need to go through third-party companies. It’s a massive hub of financial services, games, and decentralized apps that can’t steal your data or censor you. Most of the NFTs out in the marketplace run on the Ethereum network! (Other blockchain networks that run NFTs include Binance Smart Chain, Flow, Tezos, Solana, and Polygon among others.) Also, a majority of decentralized apps, like Uniswap and MakerDao, run on the Ethereum network.
Transactions are permanent, verifiable, and securely distributed across the network, giving participants full ownership and transparency into transaction data. Ethereum is — you guessed it — a decentralized network. If you want to run an application on the Ethereum network, all you need to do is learn the native programming language, Solidity, and get coding.
Ethereum is not a currency, it’s a platform. The currency that runs on the Ethereum blockchain is Ether. Ether incentivizes the decentralized nodes to run effectively and efficiently in verifying blocks and transaction data. We’ll touch more on the currency in another writeup!
