How much is Ethereum worth today?

Ether is the coin, Ethereum is the network

Ethereum is a shared computer that anyone can program. Developers publish small programs to it, called smart contracts, and those programs run exactly as written whenever someone pays to use them. Lending apps, token issuers, digital collectibles and many stablecoins are built this way.

Ether (ETH) is the fuel. Every transfer and every contract call costs a fee, known as gas, and that fee is paid in ether. So when people ask “how much is ethereum”, they nearly always mean the price of one ether, which is the figure at the top of this page.

Proposed in 2013, live in 2015

Vitalik Buterin, a programmer who had been writing about Bitcoin, described Ethereum in a white paper in 2013. A group of co-founders joined him, and the network went live in July 2015.

Two later upgrades shape how ether works now. In August 2021 the network began burning part of every fee, removing that ether for good. In September 2022 it switched from mining to proof of stake in an upgrade known as the Merge. Since then, new ether goes to validators, who lock up their own ETH to secure the chain, instead of to miners running power-hungry machines.

No fixed limit on supply

Bitcoin will never exceed 21 million coins. Ether has no such ceiling. Validators earn freshly issued ether, the fee burn takes some out of circulation, and the balance between those two flows decides whether the total grows or shrinks over any given stretch. Today’s count is 122.14M ETH.

That open-ended design is one reason the two coins are hard to compare unit for unit. A hard cap and a flexible supply lead to very different numbers of coins in existence.

Why one ETH costs less than one BTC

A single ether usually trades for a small fraction of a single bitcoin, and that tells you little about which network is bigger. What tells you more is market cap: the price of one coin multiplied by every coin in circulation. On that measure, ether holds rank 2 among all cryptocurrencies, and you can see the rest on our top coins table.

Each ether also splits into one quintillion tiny units called wei, so nobody has to buy a whole coin. Fees are usually quoted in gwei, a billionth of an ether. Bitcoin breaks down in a similar way, into satoshis.