The Power of Collaboration With:

Beginning in 2015, the entire focus of blockchain technology had shifted through a period of 4 different phases of currency trading, which altogether led to the currencies major fruition in how social groups on the network interact with finance today.

As the flow of information cannot exist without a set standard of systems put in place, what’s detailed to be essential here is how the creation and mention of smart contracts in 1996 by Nick Szabo, created the essential spark in ideas that would ultimately lead to the development of the blockchain in 2009 by the still-anonymous figure Satoshi Nakamoto. Through forums, and internet collaboration, like the pioneer himself, a couple of developers came together to strengthen the ultimate development of a decentralized network that wouldn’t necessarily have to serve as an altcoin just in its surface level.

In 2013, the core collaboration of the team behind Ethereum were a major set of people, these being Vitalik Buterin, Dr. Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Joseph Lubin, and Charles Hoskinson. Although these names may sound unfamiliar, they are soon going to be important near the end of this article.

Generally speaking, the entire development of blockchain technology is divided between the use of forks, it is what platforms such as GitHub use to align strings of code together without having to make multiple programs run separately from each other while they’re meant to be combined to make a piece of software run on an operating system. These forks, were essentially split between 4 different phases, though this is important, what must be thought of is the initial branch of development that ultimately led to the cryptocurrency gaining its traction.

Throughout the summer of 2016, an organization was developed called DAO, which stands for the decentralized autonomous organization, a specifically organized collaboration between groups that was meant to secure governance and cybersecurity within the blockchain by helping to branch members together in a network without a central organization having to overlook things. If you’re familiar with the term hierarchy, you could also refer back to our article about the web 3.0 platform Audius, which is essentially focused on the same thing, using currency to ensure safety and security for a user on the network, with the help of smart contracts.

Without a DAO, it would be near impossible for security to ever have any value on the network, as a particular alignment of transactions must be agreed upon with the use of sharing verified information amongst a group of people, like you typically would have to when you’re crypto mining amongst a legion of miners who are busy with using GPUs to solve math algorithms. Although Ethereum is one of the biggest currencies that help to drive cryptocurrency mining, it is a topic that is still developing, and will be taught to its fullest extent in later workshops.

By meeting conditions of the DAO, Buterin was able to create a mechanism as part of a fork, at which he was able to balance both efficiency and security in Ethereum through a mechanism called proof-of-stake. Unlike proof-of-work, the main difference between either terms is that proof-of-stake is more secure, in that the opening of new blocks originating from the genesis block on the network is done so on the premise that those who have governing coins in their cold or hot wallets are validated to be able to not only perform crypto mining, but are also required to have validators that will help them to continue making transactions.

Going back to the Audius example, without validators in the network who may carefully verify the amount of coins you have, those with higher amounts of stakes in coins are more likely to be given the privilege of actually performing transactions. It would be important to mention that, owning stakes in a cryptocurrency is like giving a down payment for a newly purchased car, it secures the purchase in case anything ever happens and proceeds to help hold governance over the transaction.

In case you’re wondering, both PooW and PooS uses the similar mechanisms, though proof-of-stake is focused on a random selection of validators that will confirm the creation of new blocks based on the spread of coins between members, whereas proof-of-work is more or less a version of this idea with an even amount of traffic spread amongst parallel and identical blockchains. Buterin, having adopted this transition between PooW and PooS, was able to save energy towards the use and development of Ethereum, as it saves power and costs that would otherwise be too expensive and potentially harmful to the business.

Speaking of funding, next to the initial appearance of DAOs and its ability to save costs to improve security, the extension to this idea had many investors pay attention to the concept of ETH especially after the initial release of the white paper (concept proposal and blueprint) to financial experts looking to invest in new ideas. With a rise up of 18,000 investors through an ICO, Buterin had already raised 11 million dollars worth of ETH through a decentralized venture fund, though do to security flaws and coding defects in smart contracts, various funders of the project would essentially withdraw their profits from initially supporting the ‘then’ early idea of an alternative Bitcoin.

Although setbacks had occurred early on in the world of Ethereum, it can be carefully considered that at the careful handle of collaboration, other applications took early notes of the upcoming currency by 2016. In case you haven’t heard of this application, MetaMask has been one of the major digital wallets existing on the blockchain, used for purchasing property of all sorts such as NFTs, and ultimately providing ease-of- access to financial information without risk of potential attacks occurring.

By the time Ethereum had appeared and became a go-to currency for tools that weren’t necessarily for use of its altcoin mainframe, through developing a user experience for those seeking to develop accounts that will instantly store back-end cryptographic data, it was assured that a major growth in the monthly user base for the application would eventually reach to its 100 million members by 2022. Through this diversion from a setback to a collaboration, Ethereum was not only more accessible, but easier to be invested not just from financial experts ranging from Wall Street but also from separate individuals.

By May 31st, 2023, 120 millions of coins in ETH were in circulation, with a market cap of 2.5 billion dollars. Now, you may believe this was the only version of ETH holding a value of overing 1,000$ individually (specifically 1,874$), there was another version of this altcoin that remained to have rised up to a greater value, which went by the name Ethereum Classic. As previous coins are solely focused on using DAOs and smart contracts to suggest governance over financial value and expansion amongst each member on the network, ETC was specifically designed to completely divert initial base formats of smart contracts by creating a new branch of the same mechanism responsible for PooW and PooS systems, by catering to a special interest for people to use parallel chains on the network which will foster a community of data engineers that may develop applications at a limitless rate without censorship.

It is the sole definition of governance in the network, that has the same capabilities of ETH, only developing to make use of a different standard that isn’t ERC-720 or ERC- 1150. As commercialization, regardless of whether or not the product is in a decentralized environment or not, is applied to Ethereum in ways that most would not predict this rise user engagement on such a standard range in time. Through consistent marketing, and a node infrastructure that would instantly support use of the platform at a higher rate than Bitcoin, 400,000+ developers are now capable of building and preserving applications on the platform with the use of Ethereum and the subduing applications that come after such as MetaMask.

In order to expand a little more on the integration of the currency, MetaMask was not the only application that would take ETH tokens into different accounts. Considering that Ethereum works under its own API, the integration process fell forward into the hands of web3 developers looking to implement it into their own wallet mainframes that are individually called dApps. A dApp, in accordance with the description of the main documentation of Ethereum terms, is an application that combines smart contracts with the activity of front end users to develop an interface which shares these contracts transparently so that the free interaction that clients demand towards deploying anonymity and storing data with integrity is possible.

As mentioned before, ETC, which is valued at 140 million coins, is designed to intertwine with both the use of ETH and this new network of adopting applications altogether. Now, at the beginning of this article, something of the term ‘fork’ was mentioned. A fork, is simply a branch of code from already existing prompt of working programming languages, in order to create new software and applications. Many cryptocurrencies, either being altcoins or stablecoins, are essentially just forks of the initial Bitcoin standard, which for specificity reasons is SHA-256 that helps with forming hash numbers for identity performing infinite transactions on the network itself.

The network itself in hindsight, next to ETC and ETH’s own branch of dApps, is simply made up of currencies with the use of DAOs and ICOs that act as forks of what Satoshi Nakamoto initially created and forwarded to developers looking to create stablecoins and altcoins. As the general discussion behind Ethereum has thus far in this article been narrowed to the thoughts and acts of Buterin as well as his colleagues, the documentations can also be displayed through real-life events for marketing purposes, as I’ve mentioned before that commercialization is the remaining importance apart from technicalities that help to grow the network on a fundamental level.

Between 2013 and 2015 for example, Vitalik Buterin had appearance in conference during January 2014 at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, introducing the currency officially to a major group of people already invested into the idea, with one particular person before the conference about 2 months earlier in November 2013, going by the name Joseph Lubin, someone who later joined Buterin to work on the project by developing the Ethereum Foundation, and organization responsible for creating the studio ConsenSys focused on providing decentralized software services to various large-scale corporations.

Once again, next to MetaMasks adoption of the ETH and ETC fork, as well as the expansion of dApps, and the sourcing of the crypto-based application through Joseph Lubin’s contribution, these essential milestones brought the activity of the currency to where it is beyond what it was initially perceived to be in 2013. Keep in mind, every idea behind a Web 3.0 application, is introduced through a white paper, at which the idea began with Byterin as a release to the public in Winter 2013, which then in time led to fork transitions such as the Beacon Chain upgrade mentioned before, public appearances, and of course collaborations with other enthusiasts. Altogether, it is essential to say that ETH is ever so slightly using the decentralized format of the community to build bigger and better tools for the next generation of the internet, and it also suggests that, sometimes hierarchy of apps and users will not promote as much as innovation as the timeline of creating a major product.