Smart-contract blockchain platform
Ethereum is the smart-contract blockchain platform launched in July 2015 by Vitalik Buterin and a co-founding team that included Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin, Charles Hoskinson, and Anthony Di Iorio. It introduced general-purpose programmability (the Ethereum Virtual Machine) on a public blockchain, enabling decentralized applications, tokens, and — most importantly for this universe — NFTs.
Ethereum hosts the Curio Cards series (May 2017, predating the ERC-721 standard) and is the underlying platform for the broader NFT-art history covered in Adventures in NFTs. The blockchain transitioned from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (the "Merge") in September 2022.