10 Things You Might Not Know About Ethereum

Ethereum is currently the market’s second largest cryptocurrency as per market cap and is a very popular blockchain network among enterprise users. Given it is such an exciting cryptocurrency, it should come as no surprise that it has some cool secrets hidden up its sleeve. In today’s listicle, we will tell you 10 things you might not know about Ethereum.

1. Ethereum has some great co-founders

Ethereum was co-founded by some extremely talented and visionary developers including young genius Vitalik Buterin and men like Joseph Lubin, who later on went on to found ConsenSys.

These people have a great degree of influence on the crypto world to this day.

You May Also Read: Who Is Vitalik Buterin?

2. Ethereum cryptocurrency is called Ether

Although we keep referring to it as Ethereum, the cryptocurrency ETH actually stands for Ether. Ethereum is essentially the name of the blockchain network underlying the cryptocurrency itself.

3. Ethereum is one of the most popular platform for smart contracts

Blockchain smart contracts, which are becoming increasingly popular in the world of crypto and blockchain are frequently built and run on the Ethereum platform.

Even though some competitors like NEO (which is known as the Chinese Ethereum) have emerged, Ethereum continues to remain the leading platform for smart contracts.

4. Ethereum is also great for hosting dApps

Dapps or decentralized applications are also commonly hosted and run on the Ethereum blockchain, just like smart contracts. Anything from games to prediction markets can be created through dApps.

You May Also Read: Top 5 Ethereum-based Decentralized Applications

5. Ethereum once had a major security breach

Ethereum once had a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) hacked, owing to a bug in the code.

After the hacker managed to siphon off substantial amounts of funds, the Ethereum community decided on a hard fork to reverse the loss.

6. The original Ethereum blockchain is intact on Ethereum Classic

When the aforementioned hack happened and a hard fork was decided upon, a small section of the Ethereum community disagreed, arguing that “code is law”. They stayed back with the original blockchain, which still has a record of the hack. That is now known as Ethereum Classic (ETC).

You May Also Read: 10 Differences Between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic

7. Ethereum has the second highest market cap out of all crypto coins

Ethereum occupies the second position in the crypto market, right after Bitcoin. As of now, Ethereum is followed by Ripple. However, oftentimes, as we have seen in the past, Ripple is quite capable of occasionally displacing Ethereum from this position.

Even in the initial part of this year, Ripple enjoyed a short stint in the second spot.

8. Ethereum Cryptocurrency ETH is a Token

The Ethereum cryptocurrency is not a crypto coin, instead it is a token. This means that ETH is used less like Bitcoin is (as currency and a store of value) and more as a token that facilitates functions within the Ethereum blockchain.

You May Also Read: Tokens, Coins and Altcoins: Differences Explained

9. Ethereum has an annual supply hard cap

The supply cap of ETH is 18 million a year, as opposed to the total hard cap of 21 million that Bitcoin has. Therefore, the supply cap of Ethereum is much more flexible and relaxed and there are already many more ETHs than there will ever be BTCs.