With crypto prices heading up and to the right to start 2020, new and returning traders seeking to allocate capital in the market may benefit from revisiting the basics of major cryptocurrencies.

With this in mind, Kraken Intelligence, our in-house research team, has released a new note, entitled “Into the Ether,” which gives a succinct yet comprehensive overview of Ethereum and its cryptocurrency, ether, the second-largest crypto asset by market capitalization.

At just 14 pages, “Into the Ether” explains Ethereum’s technology and traces its historical market adoption. It concludes with detailed sections on the project’s planned upgrade to Ethereum 2.0, an ambitious change that could reshape Ethereum’s economy and the broader crypto landscape.

The research notes will answer questions essential to understanding Ethereum, including:

• Who founded Ethereum? An introduction to the project’s founders and developers, including Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin and Gavin Wood.

• How does Ethereum differ from Bitcoin? You’ll get an overview of the technology’s building blocks including smart contracts, its native programming language, Solidity, and the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which keeps the state of Ethereum’s “World Computer.”

• How has Ethereum evolved? A comprehensive timeline of the various upgrades so far made to the Ethereum protocol from its beta launch in 2015 to today.

• What is Ethereum’s roadmap? We’ll cover Ethereum 2.0, the project’s upcoming network upgrade which will seek to enact the project’s most ambitious changes (like proof-of-stake, beacon chain, sharding and more).

• Which platforms could challenge Ethereum? An overview of other smart contracting platforms and cryptocurrencies vying to compete with Ethereum, as well as the technical changes they think could make their products more compelling to users and traders.