Ethereum wallet

Vitalik Buterin worked with prominent contemporary cryptocurrency figures such as Joseph Lubin and Charles Hoskinson on Ethereum’s early development, and in July 2014, Ethereum underwent a crowdsale that raised $14 million. Ethereum officially went live in July 2015 with its ‘Homestead’ release, signaling the emergence of the first Turing-complete smart contracts platform.

However, Ethereum quickly ran into trouble as The DAO, an investor-driven community VC fund, was hacked for roughly $150 million in June 2016. In what has become a defining moment for the cryptocurrency industry, two camps emerged from the debacle.

On one side, there was Buterin and the community who wanted to hard fork the protocol to roll back the stolen funds from the hack. On the other, the community proponents of ‘code is law’ who viewed any hard fork as a violation of Ethereum’s core principles. The blockchain was eventually forked, with the former camp (i.e., Buterin’s) becoming Ethereum and the latter becoming Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum is a smart contracts platform where contracts are coded in either the programming language Solidity or the experimental language Vyper. The primary Ethereum client is written in Golang. Contrary to Bitcoin, Ethereum utilizes an account-based model compared to Bitcoin’s UTXO set due to specific design considerations.

Ethereum rapidly arose as the foundation for the ICO craze of 2017, functioning as the standardized infrastructure for the launch of ERC-20 tokens and innumerable projects striving to become the next major success story. Multiple decentralized applications (dapps) presented intriguing case studies into what was possible with ‘unstoppable applications’ running on the network, but the ICO bubble eventually collapsed, and Ethereum’s community turned its focus to looming scaling issues.

Currently, a proof-of-work consensus blockchain network like Bitcoin, the debate over Ethereum’s ability to meet network demands for a new generation of dapps to run on top of it has led to heated debates about the platform’s future.

Proposed innovations from Plasma to Dappchains have entered the mix, but the widely accepted roadmap for the legacy smart contracts platform has come to be known as Ethereum 2.0 or ‘Serenity’.

Vitalik Buterin has largely stepped back as the Ethereum development community has flourished. At the beginning of 2019, the concept of open finance (i.e., DeFi) became a prevailing narrative for the platform as projects from MakerDAO to Compound Finance surged in popularity.

However, scaling issues still persist, and Ethereum is currently undergoing its long-awaited transition into a proof-of-stake (PoS) network to meet network demands. As part of the roadmap to ‘Serenity,’ the ultimate destination of a sharded PoS Ethereum, the community recently moved forward with its “Constantinople” upgrade.

With the code for Ethereum 2.0 set to be finalized this summer, Ethereum joins a class of emerging PoS blockchain networks at the convergence of scalability and interoperability. A behemoth in the cryptocurrency community, Ethereum’s future is sure to play a critical role in the broader ecosystem with powerful externalities on the underlying technology’s future direction.

When you first buy cryptocurrency, you’re issued with two keys: public and private.

• A public key serves as an address that can be shared with other parties to perform transactions.
• A private key represents a randomly generated number that signs transactions and protects your assets from malicious attacks. If it gets compromised or lost, you won’t be able to access your cryptocurrency wallet to spend, withdraw, or transfer your coins.

To safeguard and keep track of your keys, you can use online or offline wallets. Online wallets, also known as hot wallets, store private keys on systems or devices that are connected to the internet. Hot wallets are easy and convenient to use, however, they come with several drawbacks. Besides being susceptible to attacks and a honeypot for hackers, with hot wallets, the custody of private keys is often entrusted to a third party such as a crypto exchange, which means you never have full control over your funds. The safer choice are specialized hardware wallets that store private keys offline. Stealing private keys from a hardware wallet would require physical access to the wallet and corresponding PIN or the recovery phrase. What’s more, with hardware wallet, you don’t need to rely on third party custodians.

Ledger Nano is the industry-leading hardware wallet. With more than five million customers, Ledger Nano wallets have several layers of security that protect private keys, and hence your assets:

• Your private keys are stored on secure element chips.
• A PIN code and a 24-word recovery phrase are required to access the wallet.
• Ledger Nano crypto wallets have been built using highly durable materials for protection against physical damage.

With full isolation between private keys and your computer/mobile, Ledger Nano crypto wallets keep your keys secure and give you complete control over your coins.