BTC & ETH is the holy grail of portfolios on this sub.

Most of you already understand Bitcoin and its "digital gold" status. However, I notice that Ethereum is more considered as your "safest alt exposure", without much depth in its utility or what it solves.

I'm creating a short post to explain the value proposition of Ethereum without discussing tokenomics and price speculation.

Enjoy!

Ethereum Explained for N00bs

Ethereum is the network. Ether (ETH) is the native coin.

The token is also casually referred to as Ethereum sometimes, but you need to know the distinction.

What the project provides is a platform to build decentralized apps or launch tokens on the Ethereum network, called ERC-20 tokens.

These are the "coins" that you can swap on DEXes such as Uniswap (for example: Aave, Graph, USDC, etc.). They all have contract addresses in the format of "0x..." and you can provide liquidity on the Ethereum network.

Anyone can launch a token on the Ethereum network, but only those that provide some value or utility will be successful.

Apart from tokens, you can also build smart contracts on the Ethereum network.

Smart contact is an executable piece of code that you can deploy to the network. It's like a function in programming, where you can define which functionalities to run when users transact with their addresses.

One or more smart contracts + a front-end (HTML/CSS/JS + web3 libs) to interact with them, effectively create a dApp (decentralized application).

Lastly, for any operation on the network, you pay gas fees using the ETH token. I think most of you are already intimately familiar with this concept.

---

This is just a general overview to give newcomers a clearer perspective of what Ethereum is and what is value proposition is.

To learn more, you can read about the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, the blockchain trilemma, layer 2s, or dive deeper in the technical details of the Ethereum network, even try to write a smart contract and deploy it on a testnet using the Remix IDE and following the docs. This might be your first step towards becoming a blockchain developer.

Welcome and enjoy accumulating!