Buy Ethereum in Australia on CoinJar

Ethereum is the second-biggest by market capitalization and the crypto that pioneered the broader use of blockchain as a technology.

Created in 2015 by 19-year-old prodigy Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum inverted the Bitcoin model, emphasising the blockchain over the currency itself. If blockchains could verify monetary transactions, then why not shipping manifests, airline bookings, website code or home ownership?

Ethereum in popular culture

Buy ETH because it's cool? How pop culture is absorbing Ethereum

Ethereum and its related concepts have started to seep into pop culture. If you were considering a crypto that the cool kids like, buying Ethereum might interest you.

Futurama and Ether

Futurama, the animated sci-fi comedy series, has more than once.

And of course, you can buy an NFT of in a Futurama-style vase.

Celebs and Ether

Celebs are also deep into Ethereum. For example, Paris Hilton got into Ethereum in 2016, and to have made a tidy profit from her early investment.

Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, has become a celebrity in his own right. And, he is becoming known as .

These kinds of pop culture appearances helped to raise awareness and interest in Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies among the general public, especially the younger generation. And this just makes buying ETH seem like a fun thing to do!

Buying ETH because of the developers behind it

Ethereum’s biggest innovation in this respect was what Buterin termed ‘smart contracts’ – programmable and unalterable contracts that would auto-execute when certain conditions were met.

This simple idea meant Ethereum could become the first true blockchain platform: A blockchain upon which decentralized apps and blockchains could be built.

Participants pay so-called “gas” fees to use the network, which are denominated in Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH). The more demand there is, the higher the gas fees.

While there’s no hardcoded upper limit on the amount of ETH to be created like there is with Bitcoin, Ethereum has introduced a mechanism that means a certain amount of ETH is burnt in every transaction, helping to reduce inflationary pressures. It’s predicted that over time this will lead to more ETH being destroyed than created.

The network is powered by a Proof-of-Stake consensus model that requires 99.95% less energy than Proof-of-Work models like Bitcoin. This means that people who hold a certain amount of ETH can stake it to help verify transactions, receiving newly issued ETH in the process.

Many of the biggest and most exciting projects in the crypto space are built on Ethereum. The platform’s ERC-20 standard is the architecture that powers more than 20 of the coins on CoinJar – including all the major DeFi projects – while NFTs (non-fungible tokens) came into being thanks to ERC-721.