2017
MORE PROTOCOL CHANGES Since the 2016 event , there have been seven further planned ‘ fork ’ events that have transformed the Ethereum currency . The new protocols keep Ethereum running more efficiently and securely and are named events .
They are :
• Tangerine Whistle - October 2016
• Spurious Dragon - November 2016
• Byzantium - October 2017
• Constantinople - February 2019
• Petersburg ( unplanned ) - February 2019
• Istanbul - December 2019
• Muir Glacier - January 2020
2016
ETHEREUM AND ETHEREUM CLASSIC As a result of the unplanned and planned protocols that took place on the Ethereum platform , the cryptocurrency split in 2016 to become two separate entities . Reports suggest the split followed a system manipulation that resulted in US $ 50mn worth of Ethereum being stolen . The event created a ‘ fork ’, which is now referred to as the DAO Event after the Distributed Autonomous Organisation ( DAO ) that the cryptocurrency was stolen from .
2021
ETHEREUM VS BITCOIN Ethereum is much faster to mine than Bitcoin . The average block time for Ethereum is significantly less than Bitcoin ’ s , at just 12 seconds versus 10 minutes . In 2021 , only half of the Ether coins were mined ( a supply of more than 90 million tokens ), whereas the majority of Bitcoins had been mined due to its supply being capped at 21 million .