Ether (ETH) (commonly referred to as “ee-th” rather than “ether”) is the cryptocurrency that functions on the Ethereum blockchain. Ether is the token, Ethereum is the network. ETH is bought and sold, not Ethereum.

ETH (which some people just call “Ethereum”) is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. It is second only to Bitcoin. The market capitalization of ETH is has been greater than $250 Billion for some time, which is about half the market capitalization of Bitcoin.

ETH was launched in 2015.

ETH is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network that is used as a means of payment on the platform. It is the “fuel” for operating the Ethereum platform. Users pay ETH to network participants to have their code execution requests fulfilled. In this way, ETH is the payment in a market for computation. This market provides an economic incentive for participants to provide computational resources for verifying and executing transaction requests. More computation requests will drive up the price of ETH.

ETH is stored in Ethereum accounts. You need an Ethereum account to own ETH directly in a wallet. However, ETH can be purchased initially on a centralized cryptocurrency exchange, which is a custodial wallet.

In decentralized finance (DeFi), ETH can be used as collateral. People can “lock ETH” and borrow other coins against it. In this way, ETH can be put to use.