Developed by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum is a public, open-sourced Blockchain-based platform developed that features smart contracts. It would be wrong to define Ethereum as a cryptocurrency or confuse it with Ether, a cryptocurrency part of Ethereum system.

Ethereum was created as a platform that has the ability for users to build programs without the involvement of middlemen, including central servers to store information that makes them less exposed to abuses of those middlemen and authorities.

Ethereum went live on July 30, 2015, and is the second major currency on the market with 45 billion dollars of capitalization.

The latest news about Ethereum mostly concerns the move to Serenity the last post-development phase of Ethereum as well as changing Ether mining’s concept from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake in order to reduce the power cost of the process.