Another high potential and highly controversial development spurred by the success of the smart contracts and dApps is the emergence of crowdfunding, also called ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings)

ICOs are events in which a start-up in the cryptocurrency space announces a crowdsale of its resident token in exchange for capital to fund its product development. Investors buy the token at ...

How Many Ethereum Are There?

Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum’s total supply is not set. As of May 24, 2018, the circulating supply (ETH in existence) is 99,630,274 (Coinmarketcap).

What Is The Price Of Ethereum?

As of May 24, 2018, the price of Ethereum was $606.96.

However, Ethereum prices tend to fluctuate dramatically, and these prices swing on a daily (and hourly) basis.

It's important to note that the cryptocurrency market is very volatile - as you can see from the chart (5 year period) below:

Unfamiliar Programming Language

Ethereum uses its own programming language, Solidity.

Developers’ unfamiliarity with Solidity has led to code being written incorrectly, which led to problems like The DAO hack.

Projects similar to Ethereum have emerged addressing this issue and allow programmers to use more familiar languages like Javascript.

Scalability Issues

Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is facing problems, as it grows more popular.
The fact that games like CryptoKitties can cause network congestion is a cause for concern.

If Ethereum can’t handle many transactions, some critics are wondering how will it ever scale to meet the demands of a mainstream user base

Inflation

Transaction fees on the Ethereum platform are paid in Gas - and they can quickly inflate.

In fact, transaction fees increased by up to 70% Ethereum at peak usage.

As you can see in the chart below, transaction fees have fluctuated dramatically over the last few months.

Syncing Problems

Another technical problem with Ethereum is that sometimes the Ethereum wallet won't sync properly with the blockchain.

This means sometimes users can't see their wallet's actual balance - and the figures are can be inaccurate.

As you can imagine, that's a bit worrying for some users!

When several smart contracts are working in harmony, they can produce complex outcomes in a strict and exact way as programmed by the creator. When this happens, the group of smart contracts can be referred to as a decentralized application, or dApp.

To find out what the blockchain can enable us to do, it is important to note that the Ethereum blockchain gives us three types of dApps.

• Money based applications allow us to trade in money, transferring it from wallet to wallet, peer to peer, at a fraction of traditional costs.
• Applications that involve money allow for the transfer of other types of data, including records, licenses, certificates, etc. in exchange for that money.
• Other applications that do not necessarily involve the transfer of money but can give absolute provenance and security of other types of assets are also possible — for example, government systems like voting, opinion polls, and surveys.