Ethereum is also an open source project which is based upon blockchain technology.
Ethereum enabled developers to develop and deploy decentralized applications like smart contracts.
What are smart contracts?
Smart contracts are similar to legal contracts where you can perform business logic or provision of
rules and regulations between two or more parties.
Vitalik Buterin Developed Ethereum in 2013.
Vitalik.
Buterin was one of the initial coders for Bitcoin blockchain, but soon after working with the Bitcoin
codebase, he realized that Bitcoin blockchain has various limitations for the users over Bitcoin.
Every participant needs to adhere to the rules and regulations as per the whole chain.
So he developed Ethereum blockchain where you can set up rules and regulations between two or more users
instead of letting all the users follow the same set of rules.
Ethereum Blockchain uses the principle of Ethereum Virtual Machine, which is a decentralized virtual
machine similar to Java Virtual machine.
Ethereum virtual machine computes and compiles the smart contract code and makes the code available
to users to run the functions.
A public Crowdsale initially funded Ethereum in 2014, where ether tokens were issued to the people
providing funds.
The first beta release of Ethereum network was known as Olympic, which came up with the bug bounty
of 25,000 ethers for testing the limitations of Ethereum blockchain.
The next Ethereum Live blockchain was named as Frontier and launched in 2015.
This was a stable version for Ethereum.
The current milestone of Ethereum is known as Homestead, which is also considered as a stable release
and offers various improvements such as transaction processing, gas pricing and security on top of
the classic Ethereum blockchain.
Currently, two more updates are planned for the Ethereum blockchain and these updates are going to
lead the Ethereum blockchain to a hard fork as these upgrades plan to bring in the proof of stake consensus
algorithm, replacing the proof of work consensus algorithm on Ethereum blockchain.