For those who are new to the cryptocurrency space or have heard whispers about the market here and there, then you would have heard of the 2nd largest crypto in the world named Ethereum. The cryptocurrency is currently at $204 USD with a market capitalization of $21 billion USD with a daily trading volume of $1.1 billion USD. The total supply of Ether is at 102 million.

Ethereum has gained a lot of media and world-wide attention since it's creation in 2013. Vitalik Buterin originally proposed the Whitepaper of Ethereum expressing the need for decentralized applications (Dapps) and how this features could benefit the future of blockchain. In 2014, the core Ethereum team consisted of Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson

Development of the protocol was funded by an online public crowd sale during July-August 2014, which raised a total of $18 million USD, and allowed the Ethereum organisation to commence development and allow Ether to be purchased on the market in a variety of exchanges. The initial launch of the protocol (named Olympus) began in 2015 and Ethereum's protocol has went through 3 protocol upgrades since then (Frontier- 2015, Homestead- 2016, Metropolis (vByzantium)- 2017) with the long awaited Metropolis (vConstantinople) which was expected in recent times but has been pushed back to approximately Q1 or Q2 of 2019.

The Protocol suffered a DAO attack in 2016 which led the protocol to get split into two, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The DAO attack occurred after a initial crowdsale raising nearly $150 million USD which was then exploited by a hacker who stole approximately 3.6 million ether causing many problems in the protocol and causing investors to lose faith in the security and scalability of the protocol. The 2nd largest cryptocurrency has since proven to its shareholders since the hack that a similar case should never happen again and this enabled the currency to reach all-time highs earlier this year at a price of $1,417 USD per ether on January 10th.

However, through dark times in the market with a recession of nearly 85%, will the second largest player in the crypto space be able to return to all-time highs and reach new levels showing its use cases and ability to provide value to the world-wide economy.

Are you an investor in Ethereum? Where do you think Ethereum will rank in the future? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!