Starting in the late 1990s, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began addressing the impending IPv4 address exhaustion and created IPv6. While your typical IPv4 address looks like 216.239.32.21, an IPv6 address looks like 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329. The biggest and most important difference is that IPv6 allows us to go from 4.2 billion addresses to 340,300,…,000 (2^128) addresses. In case you were wondering, that’s called 340 Undecillion.

While IPv6 should allow for every single internet-connected device to have its own IP address for the foreseeable future, IPv6 and IPv4 are not compatible so the adoption has been slower than IETF and others had hoped for. We could do an entire post on that alone.