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Ethereum — Wikipedia (2026)

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Ethereum — Wikipedia (2026)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum Raw file: raw/articles/ethereum.md

What Is Ethereum

Ethereum is a decentralised, open-source blockchain platform with smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is Ether (ETH) — second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation.

Conceived in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, who argued that blockchain technology needed a Turing-complete scripting language beyond Bitcoin’s limited script. Announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, January 2014. Network launched 30 July 2015.

Co-founders: Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood (wrote the Yellow Paper / EVM spec), Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, Joseph Lubin, Jeffrey Wilcke.

History

PeriodEvent
2013Buterin publishes Ethereum whitepaper
2014Crowdsale (ETH sold for BTC); Ethereum Switzerland GmbH formed; Yellow Paper by Gavin Wood
30 Jul 2015”Frontier” — mainnet launch
2016The DAO hack — $50M stolen; hard fork splits chain into Ethereum + ethereum-classic
2017Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) — 30 founding members incl. Microsoft, JPMorgan
2017CryptoKitties congests network; ERC-721 (NFT standard) proposed
Aug 2021EIP-1559 (London upgrade) — base fee burned, reducing ETH inflation
15 Sep 2022The Merge — PoW → PoS; energy use drops >99%
13 Mar 2024Dencun — EIP-4844 Proto-Danksharding; “blobs” reduce L2 costs
7 May 2025Pectra — validator stake ceiling raised to 2,048 ETH
Dec 2025Fusaka upgrade

The DAO fork (2016): A smart contract vulnerability was exploited for $50M. The community controversially hard-forked to reverse the theft — creating Ethereum (reversed) and Ethereum Classic (original, unmodified chain).

Technical Architecture

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

A deterministic, stack-based virtual machine with a Turing-complete instruction set. Every node runs the EVM to execute smart contracts; determinism ensures all nodes reach the same post-transaction state, enabling consensus. Specified in the Ethereum Yellow Paper (Gavin Wood). Implementations exist in Go, Rust, C++, Java, Python, and others.

Accounts

Two account types:

  • Externally-Owned Accounts (EOAs) — controlled by private keys; no bytecode; used by humans/wallets
  • Contract Accounts — have bytecode and storage; code executes when transactions are sent to them; cannot initiate transactions independently

Addresses: 0x prefix + rightmost 20 bytes of Keccak-256 hash of ECDSA public key (secp256k1 curve).

Gas

Gas is the unit of computational effort. Every EVM operation has a hardcoded gas cost. Senders specify:

  • Gas limit — max gas they’ll spend
  • Gas price — ETH per gas unit (denominated in Gwei = 10⁻⁹ ETH)

EIP-1559 (2021): Split fee into base fee (burned) + tip (to block proposer). The burn mechanism makes ETH deflationary during high-demand periods.

Ether (ETH)

Native currency of the network. Denominated in wei (10¹⁸ wei = 1 ETH). Used to:

  • Pay gas fees for all transactions
  • Reward validators for proposing/attesting blocks
  • Serve as programmable money in DeFi

Proof-of-Stake (Post-Merge)

Any account can stake ≥32 ETH to register as a validator. Each ~12-second slot, validators are pseudorandomly assigned to propose or attest to blocks. Validators earn ETH rewards; dishonest or inactive validators are slashed (lose part of stake). Pectra (2025) raised the maximum stake per validator to 2,048 ETH.

Applications

ERC-20 Tokens (Fungible)

Proposed by Fabian Vogelsteller (Nov 2015). Standard API for fungible tokens — enables wallets, exchanges, and DeFi protocols to interact uniformly. Hundreds of thousands deployed; major examples: USDT, USDC, LINK, UNI.

NFTs (ERC-721, ERC-1155)

ERC-721 — unique, indivisible tokens. ERC-1155 — semi-fungible (mix of unique and fungible within one contract). First NFT project: Etheria (Oct 2015). Peak cultural moment: Beeple’s “Everydays” sold for $69.3M at Christie’s (2021).

Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Financial instruments (lending, borrowing, exchange) with no central intermediary. Built from composable smart contracts. Key protocols: Uniswap (DEX), Aave (lending), MakerDAO (stablecoin DAI). DeFi TVL peaked above $100B; Ethereum holds the dominant share.

Layer 2 Scaling

L1 throughput: ~238 TPS theoretical (60M gas limit, 12s blocks). Visa: ~45,000 TPS. Gap addressed by Layer 2 chains that inherit Ethereum security:

  • Optimistic rollups — Optimism, Arbitrum, Base
  • ZK rollups — ZKSync, StarkNet, Scroll Dencun (2024) added “blob” storage (EIP-4844) dramatically reducing L2 data costs.

Enterprise

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) — JPMorgan (Quorum), Microsoft, IBM, Visa, Deloitte among members. Permissioned Ethereum variants used for private ledgers.

  • US: CFTC treats ETH as a commodity (not a security); former CFTC Chairman Tarbert: “ETH is a commodity” (2019)
  • UCC (2022 amendments): ETH classified as a “controllable electronic record” (CER) — can be owned, transferred, and used as collateral
  • Status varies significantly by jurisdiction

Entities Mentioned

  • vitalik-buterin — original author; conceived Ethereum 2013
  • ethereum-foundation — Swiss non-profit stewarding protocol development
  • openai / Enterprise Ethereum Alliance members (Microsoft, JPMorgan, IBM, Visa)

Related concepts: ethereum | smart-contracts | proof-of-stake | defi | nft | layer-2 | ethereum-token-standards | blockchain | elliptic-curve-cryptography

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