Ethereum - Conceived in 2013
A Blockchain that's been another incredible educator where everything can be built, which is impressive. 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 compromises. Compromises being fees and sluggish which is where layer 2 solutions come in like Arbitrum and Polygon, like everything you need hands on experience of using the Blockchain with different applications to really get a good feel for it... Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum are now providing real world solutions for developers...
TPS (Transactions Per Second) is a common question with a Blockchain of Ethereum's scale and capacity, the current TPS on Ethereum is around 20 - 30.
Real world utility:
Ethereum is trying to scale to a maximum TPS of 100,000
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 and still does everything it said it would.
However with continued learning I re-allocated my investing for reasons that date back to its pre ICO days — having large individual investors and investors like JP Morgan. The famous Bill Hinman (SEC Chairman) speech which 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"
Summary
I still use Metamask, Ethereum and still invested, it's just a smaller percentage of my portfolio