Ethereum was built open source in a way to allow thousands of people around the world to build decentralized applications on the platform that would be leaderless. These applications could track finances, store data, and create compound interest in some cases with no interference by their creators.

While they are both blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies, Ethereum is built to decentralize more than just finances. From social media networks, to data security, and even video game tokenization, Ethereum is able to decentralize all of this different data. While Bitcoin is mainly used only as a store of value.

Though Ethereum has ambitious goals of replacing social media networks and other huge institutions, it has seen a scalability problem. Because all of these decentralized apps run on Ethereum, and Ethereum total supply is limited, these apps need ether to perform which costs money.

Because of Ethereum's wide range of use cases for blockchain technology, it will definitely be a valuable asset in the future. Though it has some high fees for simple tasks at the present, with the advent of Ethereum 2.0, hopefully the Ethereum blockchain will be more frictionless and easier to transact upon.