Ethereum (ETH) Wallet

Ethereum Value

Ethereum is the second biggest cryptocurrency on the market and was inspired by Bitcoin itself. The Ethereum network allows users to create dApps and smart contracts, which it is most known for. The project was established in 2013 by a Russian-Canadian programmer, Vitalik Buterin when he was just 20 years old. Buterin refers to the Ethereum network as a “World Computer” as it is not tied to one computer only and can run simultaneously on several devices. Ether (ETH), Ethereum’s native currency, is used as gas which refers to fuel for the execution of smart contracts and the functioning of dApps.

Ethereum Difficulty

Network or mining difficulty refers to the difficulty of a problem that a miner must solve to create a new block on the blockchain. It is a value that represents the number of times the hash function should be calculated before it is solved. Each network has its own average time for a block creation that has been preset, meaning that if the number of miners goes up so will the network difficulty to maintain the preset average time and vice versa. Due to the maintenance of the said average time, Ethereum difficulty will vary on different days. The highest Ethereum difficulty was recorded on June 8th, 2022 when it hit 15,101.178 TH.

Ethereum Merge

Since 2020, the team behind Ethereum has been working on improving the network by transitioning it to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The Ethereum community has been referring to the final product as Eth2, however, core developers have then moved away from this terminology in 2021. Instead of Eth1 and Eth2, they began to use the “consensus layer” and the “execution layer”. The Merge refers to the merge of the existing execution layer and the Beacon chain, a new Proof-of-Stake consensus layer that was created in 2020 and has been running parallel to the mainnet. Eth2 is now used to refer to the consensus layer and Eth1 to the consensus layer. The “new” Ethereum will just be the combination of the two.