Ethereum, a digital currency, was initially introduced in a whitepaper authored by Vitalik Buterin in 2013. Together with other co-founders, Buterin successfully secured funding for the project through an online public crowd sale in the summer of 2014. During this crowd sale, the project team managed to raise an impressive $18.3 million worth of Bitcoin. The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Ethereum was priced at $0.311 per token, and over 60 million Ether were sold. Considering the current value of Ethereum, this translates to an annualized return on investment (ROI) of over 270%, effectively nearly quadrupling the initial investment every year since the summer of 2014.
The blockchain network of Ethereum was officially launched by the Ethereum Foundation on July 30, 2015, operating under the codename "Frontier." Since its launch, the network has undergone several updates, including "Constantinople" on February 28, 2019, "Istanbul" on December 8, 2019, "Muir Glacier" on January 2, 2020, "Berlin" on April 14, 2021, and most recently, the "London" hard fork on August 5, 2021.
The primary objective of Ethereum is to establish itself as a global platform for decentralized applications. Its aim is to enable users from all corners of the globe to develop and execute software that is resistant to censorship, downtime, and fraudulent activities.
