A Decade of Ethereum: The Ongoing Experiment of the World Computer

On July 30, 2015, with the block height reaching 1028201, a decentralized world computer quietly launched in Berlin. Today, ten years later, Ethereum has grown from an experimental project into a cornerstone of crypto innovation, supporting thousands of applications and connecting tens of thousands of developers.

At this historic juncture, the Ethereum Foundation has launched an NFT transfer event to pay tribute to the developers, users, and ideas that have shaped Ethereum over the past decade. Ultimately, this NFT will be destroyed to commemorate Ethereum's ten-year journey.

This article will review ten key historical moments in the development of Ethereum, covering technological breakthroughs, policy games, ecological development, and market turning points.

2013-2014: Release of the Ethereum White Paper and Early Financing

In November 2013, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin released the first draft of the Ethereum white paper and shared this idea via email for the first time. He later recalled: "This draft was the result of months of thought and work regarding the field of 'cryptocurrency 2.0.'"

Within months of the white paper's release, Vitalik quickly assembled a founding team of eight members, including Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, Amir Chetrit, Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

In January 2014, at the North American Bitcoin Conference held in Miami, USA, Vitalik formally introduced Ethereum to the public for the first time. This speech generated a huge response and quickly attracted the attention of many developers, investors, and early evangelists. Soon after, Gavin Wood published the Ethereum Yellow Paper, serving as a technical specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine, known as the "technical bible of Ethereum."

On July 22, 2014, Ethereum officially launched its early funding, raising over 30,000 Bitcoins in just 42 days, equivalent to about 18 million USD at the time's market value, and issued 72 million ETH at an average price of 0.3 USD. Such a large fundraising scale also sparked considerable doubt and controversy at the time.

2015: Ethereum mainnet goes live, producing the genesis block

In March 2015, the Ethereum official blog systematically announced the four development phases of Ethereum, clarifying the evolution path from underlying technology construction to widespread user applications: Phase One is Frontier, with the main goal of launching mining operations, establishing a transaction circulation mechanism between Ethereum and Bitcoin, starting DApp testing, and helping early users upload smart contracts using Ether; Phase Two is Homestead, the official phase following Frontier; Phase Three is Metropolis, marking the phase where Ethereum officially introduces a graphical interface to the general public; Phase Four is Serenity, with the core goal of transitioning from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).

On July 30, 2015, the Frontier phase officially launched, the Ethereum mainnet went live and produced the genesis block, with a block reward of 5 ETH.

2016: The DAO Hack Incident and Ethereum Hard Fork

In June 2016, a major security incident occurred on Ethereum, known as The DAO attack. The DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization developed by a German startup, which raised over 11.5 million ETH in just 28 days during its crowdfunding campaign on Ethereum, equivalent to approximately $149 million at the time.

However, due to a vulnerability in The DAO code, hackers launched an attack on June 17, successfully transferring about 3.64 million Ether, which directly led to a more than 50% drop in the price of Ethereum that day. Although the funds were stolen, the hackers were temporarily unable to immediately withdraw these assets due to a 28-day lock-up period set in the contract.

This incident sparked intense controversy within the crypto community, and ultimately the Ethereum community rolled back the transactions through a hard fork, recovering the stolen funds. On July 20, 2016, Ethereum officially implemented the hard fork plan at block height 1920000, resulting in the split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

2017: Early Financing Wave and Regulatory Storm

In 2017, with the popularity of the Ethereum smart contract platform, more and more startup projects began to adopt early financing methods to raise funds from global investors. This model quickly gained popularity, with total financing reaching billions of dollars throughout the year, with typical projects including EOS, Tezos, Filecoin, and Bancor.

This wave of financing has greatly promoted the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Driven by increased market demand and investment enthusiasm, the price of ETH skyrocketed from around $8 at the beginning of the year to over $700 by the end of the year. However, as hot money flooded in, a bubble quickly emerged in the market, with varying project quality. Many projects could raise tens of millions of dollars just based on a "white paper," and some projects were even suspected of fraud, resulting in investors losing everything.

With the frequent occurrence of chaos, global regulatory agencies have begun to closely monitor and take rectification measures, with countries such as China, the United States, South Korea, and Singapore successively issuing policies. On September 4, 2017, the People's Bank of China, the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and other seven ministries jointly issued a notice, clearly stating that relevant financing activities are illegal, ordering all projects to stop immediately, and requiring the return of investors' funds. After the announcement was made, almost all related projects and trading platforms in China were quickly shut down, triggering market panic. Subsequently, the U.S. SEC also classified some tokens as securities, emphasizing that related projects must comply with the registration and disclosure obligations of U.S. securities laws, and investigations and prosecutions of violations were launched.

Under the high pressure of global policies, a large number of projects and platforms have been forced to shut down, funds have quickly withdrawn, project valuations have significantly declined, and the cryptocurrency market has accelerated into a cooling period. Nevertheless, this wave of financing has, to some extent, established Ethereum as the core platform for DApps and smart contracts.

2020-2021: A Feast of DeFi and NFTs

From 2020 to 2021, it was a critical turning point for the explosive growth of the Ethereum ecosystem. During this period, DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) rapidly emerged, becoming one of the important driving forces that pushed blockchain technology into the mainstream spotlight, thereby establishing Ethereum as the central hub of crypto infrastructure.

The rise of DeFi began in the first half of 2020, when a certain protocol launched its liquidity mining mechanism in June, allowing users to earn governance tokens by depositing assets, which sparked a craze for yield farming. This mechanism was quickly emulated by other protocols, leading to a massive influx of funds and users with high annual percentage yields (APY), and various sectors such as DEX, lending, synthetic assets, and insurance protocols flourished. The total locked value (TVL) in the DeFi sector surged from less than $1 billion at the beginning of 2020 to over $200 billion by the end of 2021, setting a historical record. Although the DeFi boom brought innovation and wealth effects, security incidents such as smart contract vulnerabilities, hacker attacks, and liquidation risks of highly volatile assets also occurred frequently.

Almost simultaneously with DeFi, NFTs experienced a breakout explosion in 2021, gradually evolving from niche crypto art to a global cultural phenomenon. Popular NFTs became star assets, with floor prices repeatedly setting records, and celebrities accelerated their entry; digital artist Beeple's NFT work "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" sold for $69 million at Christie’s auction house, becoming the third most expensive work by a living artist; NFT trading platforms rapidly emerged, with monthly trading volumes skyrocketing from several million dollars to billions; traditional brands launched NFT series, integrating NFTs with brand marketing; certain projects combined NFTs with blockchain gaming, fueling the Play to Earn craze.

2020: Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain Launched

2020 was an important turning point in the development of Ethereum. On December 1, the Beacon Chain ( officially went live, marking the first phase of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade and signifying the transition of Ethereum from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

Ethereum 2.0 is a major upgrade to the Ethereum network, aimed at addressing issues such as scalability, security, and energy consumption that Ethereum faces. It is mainly divided into three phases: the Beacon Chain, Shard Chains, and the Merge. Among them, the Beacon Chain is the core component of the Ethereum 2.0 architecture, mainly responsible for managing validators, coordinating consensus, and laying the technical foundation for future sharding mechanisms. Its main functions include validator management, block generation, and reward and punishment mechanisms.

As of July 2025, there are currently over 35.3 million ETH staked, accounting for 29.17% of the circulating supply of Ethereum, with more than 1.09 million active validators, demonstrating Ethereum's strong network security and user participation.

2022: Ethereum fully transitioned from PoW to PoS

On September 15, 2022, Ethereum officially completed the merger of the mainnet and the Beacon Chain (The Merge), marking the full transition of the Ethereum network from PoW to PoS. After the merger, the computational power competition relied on by the PoW mechanism is no longer a means of obtaining block rewards, and the issuance of new ETH has significantly decreased. At the same time, since PoS no longer relies on large-scale GPU devices for mining, the overall energy consumption of the Ethereum network has decreased by over 99%.

"We have finally confirmed that the Ethereum merge has been completed, which is an important moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today," Vitalik stated at the time.

However, this transformation has also had a huge impact on the original Ethereum miner community. The GPU mining rigs used by miners are no longer suitable for mining on the Ethereum mainnet. Some miners have chosen to switch to other crypto projects that use the PoW mechanism, while others have exited the mining industry or turned to other fields such as AI and gaming.

2024: Ethereum Spot ETF Approved

After years of regulatory games and multiple revisions of registration documents, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officially approved the Ethereum spot ETF applications of several issuers on July 23, 2024. The first batch of approved products comes from several well-known institutions.

This approval not only marks a significant breakthrough for Ethereum on the compliance road but also greatly enhances its market legitimacy and liquidity, becoming an important milestone for Ethereum's move towards mainstream finance.

Nevertheless, the current Ethereum staking feature has not yet been included in these ETF products, and related applications are still being advanced. Multiple issuers are seeking to incorporate a Staking yield mechanism in future versions.

As of now, the total net asset value of Ethereum spot ETFs has exceeded $20.66 billion, accounting for approximately 4.64% of Ethereum's total market capitalization, and has achieved net inflows for four consecutive months, demonstrating strong market demand and institutional participation enthusiasm.

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2024: Ethereum Cancun Upgrade

On March 13, 2024, after multiple delays and tests, Ethereum finally completed the highly anticipated Cancun (Dencun) upgrade. This upgrade is not only an important milestone in the technical roadmap but is also seen as a key step in driving Ethereum towards large-scale scalability.

The core technological improvement in the Cancun upgrade is the introduction of EIP-4844 (also known as Proto-Danksharding), which is the initial stage of Ethereum's transition to full data sharding (Danksharding), introducing the concept of blobs (data blocks) for the first time. By temporarily storing transaction data generated by L2 scaling solutions in blobs, the data storage costs are significantly reduced. The introduction of EIP-4844 brings important changes including a substantial reduction in L2 transaction fees, enhanced network scalability, and improved developer and user friendliness.