Ethereum - Conceived in 2013
A Blockchain that's been another incredible educator where everything can be built, which is both impressive but also cumbersome. The Metamask wallet giving access to Web3, DEFI applications, yield farming, lending, Uniswap, Decentraland, Smart Contracts, Tokenization, Investing, POS, Running Nodes - the Blockchain's functionality is endless but with this comes a side effect. The side effect being expensive and slow which is where layer 2 solutions come in like Arbitrum and Polygon, however like everything you need hands on experience of using the Blockchain with different applications to really get a good feel for its speed and fees.
TPS (Transactions Per Second) is a common question with a Blockchain of Ethereum's scale and capacity but here lies a problem, the current TPS on Ethereum is around 12. However the TPS on Algorand for example which is ISO compliant is over 10,000 scaling to billions.
Again look over here at Ethereum while real world utility is built over there!
Ethereum is trying to scale to a maximum TPS of 100,000 but they have already been superseded by Algorand, XDC, Stellar etc.
That being said, I cut my teeth on Ethereum, used it extensively in many use cases and many wallets, I even had 3 ETH nodes running on the ETH2.0 POS Network. ETH really did everything it said it would.
However with continued self education I could see big problems ahead for the Blockchain. Problems that date right back to its pre ICO days, having large individual investors, having investors like JP Morgan and of course the famous Bill Hinman (SEC Chairman) speech. This speech gave ETH it's famous free pass through the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) where the SEC didn't "see a need to regulate ether" if this is the case then who is Ethereum benefitting?
For those who have been keeping up with the SEC lawsuit against Ripple, you will have seen this has exposed Ethereum, for me personally I can see the Ethereum Blockchain slowly becoming less relevant and this being reflected in its utility value and therefore the throughput and therefore the price.
I still use Metamask and the ETH Blockchain from time to time and still invested in a small portion of ERC-20 tokens but this is now a smaller percentage of my portfolio