Ethereum is an open source public blockchain and is considered to be an alternative coin to Bitcoin. A Canadian cryptocurrency researcher and programmer, Vitalik Buterin, proposed the idea in late 2013. Founded by an online crowdsale that took place in the middle of 2014, the platform went live at the end of July 2015. The DAO event in 2016 led to a hard fork, resulting in a split into Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

In this chapter, we cover the following topics about Ethereum:

• Overview of Ethereum
• Basic concepts such as ether, ERC20 tokens, smart contracts, EVM, gas, accounts, and oracles
• The Ethereum performance issue and ongoing efforts to address the issue, such as PoS, Casper, Plasma, and Sharding