Ether is the cryptocurrency generated by the Ethereum platform as a reward to mining nodes for computations performed and is the only currency accepted in the payment of transaction fees.^[1]

Ethereum provides a decentralized virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using an international network of public nodes.^[2] The virtual machine's instruction set, in contrast to others like Bitcoin Script, is Turing-complete. "Gas", an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network.^[2]

Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Development was funded by an online crowdsale that took place between July and August 2014.^[2] The system then went live on 30 July 2015, with 72 million coins minted.^[3][4] This accounts for about 65 percent of the total circulating supply in April 2020^[5].^{[6][non-primary source needed]}

In 2016, as a result of the exploitation of a flaw in The DAO project's smart contract software, and subsequent theft of $50 million worth of ether,^[7] Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains – the new separate version became Ethereum (ETH) with the theft reversed,^[8] and the original chain continued as Ethereum Classic (ETC).^[9]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum