Ethereum (ETH) perpetual market

Ethereum is the largest smart-contract platform, proposed by Vitalik Buterin in 2013 and launched in July 2015 after a public crowdsale. Where Bitcoin records payments, Ethereum runs a global virtual machine that executes arbitrary programs called smart contracts, making it the base layer for decentralized finance, stablecoins, NFTs and most of the token economy. Its native asset, ether, pays the gas fees that compensate validators for computation. In September 2022 Ethereum completed the Merge, abandoning energy-intensive mining for proof-of-stake, where validators lock ether to secure the chain and earn rewards. Later upgrades cut costs for the layer-2 rollups that now carry most activity. Ethereum pioneered the ERC-20 and ERC-721 token standards, and its combination of security, developer tooling and network effects keeps it the dominant settlement layer for on-chain applications.