Ethereum became the platform of choice by baking programmability into its chain

Bitcoin had become the dominant blockchain, but its relatively bare-bones design meant that smart contracts and other utilities required additional protocols. Ethereum took a different architectural path from launch by baking its own scripting language into the chain.

That choice made it relatively easy to build smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized apps, and other cryptocurrencies. Ethereum's July 2014 Ether presale raised 31,591 BTC, valued at more than $18.4 million at the time, giving the ecosystem a way to fund development.

By June 2017, Ethereum had become the platform of choice for crypto-asset entrepreneurs. More than half of the ICO events tracked by TokenMarket were Ethereum-based, and assets on the chain held just over three-quarters of the market value in CoinMarketCap's 119-asset sample.

By June 2017, Ethereum underpinned more than half of tracked ICO events; roughly a third of listed assets represented over three-quarters of their $3.4B market value.

Bitcoin's base layer was not designed to make complex applications and new assets easy to launch.

An embedded scripting language lowered the technical friction for developers building contracts, apps, and tokens.

The Ether presale supplied development capital and gave early stakeholders an incentive to reinvest in the ecosystem.

As more projects chose Ethereum, the shared base layer concentrated both activity and market value around it.

A platform can outrun a standalone product when its architecture lets others build, fund, and extend on top of it with less friction.

Ethereum's built-in abstraction layer turned one blockchain into a common foundation for a growing ecosystem of tokens, DApps, and DAOs. In the article's June 2017 snapshot, about $2.6 billion of the roughly $3.4 billion represented by 119 listed crypto-assets sat in assets built on Ethereum, including Golem, Augur, Basic Attention Token, and Gnosis.