Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to Bitcoin in market capitalization.

Pub/Sub allows services to communicate asynchronously, with latencies on the order of 100 milliseconds. Pub/Sub is used for streaming analytics and data integration pipelines to ingest and distribute data. It's equally effective as a messaging-oriented middleware for service integration or as a queue to parallelize tasks.