Ethereum small history

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of fraud or third party interference.

Ethereum was crowdfunded during August 2014 by fans all around the world. It is developed by ETH Development Team, a Swiss non-profit, with contributions from great minds across the globe.

On July 30th, 2015, ethereum mined its first block. Since then, it has become one of the largest blockchain networks in the world. As of September 2018, ether (ETH) is the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after bitcoin.

In 2016, a DAO experiment on ethereum failed due to a security flaw and resulted in the loss of over 3.6 million ETH. This event caused a hard fork and split the Ethereum blockchain into two separate blockchains: Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

As of September 2018, ETH is worth around $200 USD and has a market capitalization of over $20 billion USD.