To celebrate this monumental day for all of cryptocurrency, I wanted to share five facts that I found interesting about the platform. Cheers to the team for all your work and contributions to this space!

The symbol for Ξther is Ξ

The Ξther symbol ( Ξ ) is the uppercase of 'Xi' (lowercase ξ).

Xi is the 14th letter of the Greek alphabet. It is pronounced in Modern Greek, and generally /ˈzaɪ/ or /ˈsaɪ/ in English. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 60 (source)).

The first discussion I found as one of the first posts in their subreddit (reddit won't allow me to link it). I'm not sure whether this led to the actualization of the symbol, or even if it is the official symbol.

We can thank Blizzard's centralized management for Ξthereum

Vitalik's interest in cryptocurrencies and decentralized systems as a whole bloomed back in his World of Warcraft playing days. To this he says, "one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."

He then went on to discover Bitcoin and explore the space, leading to creation of Ξthereum. Or at least that's the 'story' behind it. Recently, he clarified in a reddit post that "it was a joke. Or rather, that experience with WoW that I had was 100% real, but the idea that the WoW experience specifically led to a decade-long bloodlust against centralization is a joke." Special thanks to u/ec265 for this note.

Ξthereum was a crowdfunded project

When Vitalik had the idea of Ξthereum he did not have enough resources to make his idea a reality. ICOs weren't really a thing back in 2013 so instead he turned to group funding to get capital for the project. His project was successful in online public sale in July-August 2014. The program was completed and delivered by July 30, 2015. The rest is history!

Ξthereum is not the unit of cryptocurrency; Ξther is

Ξthereum is the platform and Ξther is the currency so instead of saying something like, "I want to purchase 1 Ξthereum," or "I bought Ξthereum"; the correct way to say it is, "I want to purchase 1 Ξther" or "I bought Ξther."

This is obvious to most in the Ξthereum community but I don't think it's common knowledge in general crypto forums like this subreddit.

Ξthereum's ticker could have been ETR (or even XET)

In 2014, Vitalik posted a topic on the Ξthereum forum, "ETH or ETR". The topic was about the abbreviation or ticker they were going to adopt moving forward. It could've even been 'XET' as one user, Mike says, "or ISO standards, XET might be better if it is still available. Non national currencies like XAU - gold, XAG - silver, XRP - Ripple, begin with X."

The argument for ETR was so that it better reflects the currency name, Ξther. In the end, I think this last comment sold the deal, "ETH rolls off the tongue more naturally, as with the sound in breath ( the first syllable in Ξthereum) and as such is more comfortable and organic than ETR".

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So that's it! Five facts about Ξthereum. I hope you learned a thing or two, I certainly did. Special thanks to the Wayback Machine, it's such a gift for us legacy explorers.

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* This post is a repost of an earlier version that got deleted due to cursed limitations on "your post has been removed because there are already 4 posts about Ξthereum in the top 50." Hence, the use of "Ξ" instead of "E".