Ethereum and Smart Contracts

Ethereum is one of the most prominent projects in the blockchain ecosystem. It was officially launched in July 2015 in order to overcome some of Bitcoin's major limitation. A new programming language was created to enable the development of much more sophisticated operations than those used in Bitcoin. The goal of Ethereum is to allow the creation of decentralized applications (dApps) upon its infrastructure with the help of a unit of account called Ether, facilitating the developer's job by solely focusing on the service rather than the protocol. Ethereum was the first platform to introduce new concepts such as smart contracts and dApps, which brought to blockchain technology more user-friendliness and, of course, more applications for the end users than a sole cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. One could now develop from scratch a new...