Pro lessonUnderstanding Altcoins · 1/43 min read

Ethereum and smart contracts

What Ethereum is, how smart contracts work, what tokens and gas are, and the risks that come with code that runs by itself.

An altcoin is any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. The most widely known is Ether (ETH), the native coin of the Ethereum network. Ethereum was proposed by programmer Vitalik Buterin and launched in July 2015.

Bitcoin was designed mainly to send and hold value. Ethereum was designed to run programs. These programs are called smart contracts: code stored on the blockchain that runs exactly as written whenever someone interacts with it. No company has to approve each action.

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Education, not investment advice. Crypto prices can fall sharply and most retail traders lose money. Practice in DUKOIN uses virtual USD with no real value.