Ethereum

Ethereum is a decentralized platform to run smart contracts. It is administered by the Ethereum Foundation.

Smart contracts are called Dapps and communicate with each other using the Whisper protocol.

Interestingly, the role of the customer (which is currently populated by humans) stands to be dominated by machine function as smart contracting systems enable end-to-end payments without requiring a human initiator. What Ethereum will help facilitate is an economy of interconnected devices where machines can transmit money and data in a manner which dwarfs the efficiency of human input. Businesses which overlook this trend, will pay dearly due to new supply channels which disintermediate the old world’s necessary third parties.

Ethereum in 2016 is where bitcoin was in 2010 – raw infrastructure, lack of developers, and plenty of skeptics. ¹

[1] https://www.diginomics.com/2016/03/07/ethereum-virtual-machine/