The Ethereum Blockchain
Bitcoin was the flagman of all cryptos and its blockchain was built for the purpose of enabling and verification of peer-to-peer money transfers. With the emergence of Ethereum, the world has discovered that blockchains can be used in many other ways that continue being explored daily. In this chapter, we will discover what makes Ethereum - the second most valued blockchain, on which the EMRX token is been built - so exciting.
Read on to find out everything you always wanted to know about blockchains in this Emirex article series!
The Ethereum era started in November 2013, when a programmer by the name of Vitalik Buterin has published the whitepaper called “Ethereum: The Ultimate Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform”. The young programmer was heavily influenced by Mastercoin - one of the Bitcoin blockchain’s predecessors - and was the first one to deliver a blockchain infrastructure that could run decentralized applications built with open-source software, and written with its own language called Solidity. The developers were enabled to write the decentralized apps that run without the control of any centralized authority (DAPPs) and smart contracts in Solidity language, later added to the network. The smart contracts are then executed in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The EVM is powered by Ether tokens. The Ethereum website states that Ethereum can be used to “codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything”, and the statement seems to be proven true thus far.
There are two types of tokens on Ethereum - Ether and gas. Ether is a cryptocurrency that is sold by all crypto exchanges, including Emirex. This cryptocurrency is used as a payment instrument for transactions and services. Instead of mining coins, miners earn Ether tokens. For adding transactions to blocks, the miners are paid in gas.
Smart contracts embedded into the Ethereum blockchain are decentralized agreements with a set of conditions, which, when met, cause an automatic self-execution of these agreements. These amazing pieces of computer code allow an exchange of any value to happen and can be used for a variety of legal, financial and other purposes. The blockchain environment makes smart contracts safe, with no errors, tampering, or authoritative censorship.
Smart contracts also require gas for execution, as a reward for miners for adding the contracts to the blockchain that, due to its scripting language, can simultaneously run smart contracts throughout all nodes and achieve verifiable consensus without the need for involvement of a trustee or any kind of centralized authority.
Smart contracts are so powerful that they can create and run decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) the nature of which can be compared to that of businesses. DAOs can run and participate in a variety of activities, much like companies: sale and purchase of goods, employment of workers, payments, and so on. They do not require any human or governmental control. Ethereum has brought the future upon us, with previously unthinkable perspectives and ways to process business transactions.
Emirex supports all of the existing blockchains, including the Ethereum blockchain on which its native EMRX token is built. Come back soon to check out the next articles about the fascinating world of blockchains!
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