Ethereum (ETH) price, chart and history
Ethereum is $2,676.47, down 1.68% in the last 24 hours. Market value $326.79 billion, rank #2.
About Ethereum
Ethereum is a public blockchain that works like a shared global computer. Besides sending its own currency, ether (ETH), people use it to run programs called smart contracts, which power lending and trading apps, stablecoins, NFTs and thousands of other tokens. ETH pays the fees, known as gas, for every action on the network, and many faster networks, called layer 2s, settle their transactions back onto Ethereum.
Programmer Vitalik Buterin proposed Ethereum in a white paper in late 2013, and a group of co-founders, including Gavin Wood, who wrote its formal technical specification, helped build it. The project funded itself through a public ether sale in mid-2014 and switched on its first live version, Frontier, in July 2015. The non-profit Ethereum Foundation supports research, but many independent teams write the software that actually runs the network.
Since the 2022 Merge, Ethereum has been secured by proof of stake: validators lock up ETH as collateral and can lose part of it if they cheat, a change that cut the network's energy use by more than 99 percent. There is no fixed supply cap, although part of every fee is permanently burned. Critics point to high fees at busy times, technical complexity, costly smart-contract bugs and hacks, and concentration among large staking providers.
- Created by
- Vitalik Buterin and co-founders
- Launched
- July 30, 2015
- How it's secured
- Proof of stake (since September 2022)
- Supply
- No fixed cap; part of each fee is burned