Ethereum was first proposed in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a then 19-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer. He was immediately met with interest and support from the online community, and soon after, he co-founded the Ethereum Foundation with a group of like-minded individuals. The foundation's goal was (and still is) to build Ethereum into a decentralized platform that can be used by anyone for anything. Since then, Ethereum has grown exponentially in both popularity and functionality. It is now the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and its blockchain is being used for everything from smart contracts to decentralized applications (dApps). Ethereum is changing the way we interact with the digital world, and there's no telling what it will be used for next.