10 Years of Ethereum in 10 Chapters
Crypto moves fast. For traders and people working in the space, one week can feel like years: the price action, the daily technological updates, and dozens of new projects and tokens. But if you’re in it for the long haul, it’s worth it – because the things that make crypto hard are also the things that make it great.
A lot of crypto code is decentralized and open-source, making the barrier to entry very low, so anyone can build on the blockchain and do it fast. This means lots of projects and coins, and fierce competition.
Since crypto never sleeps, price movement is unbuffered by market closures or bank delays. That means transfers, payments, and liquidations are instant. Fortunes are made and lost in minutes, and the pace is only accelerating.
If these are the typical days in crypto, it’s daunting to look back the 10 years since Ethereum launched. Bitcoin was created in 2008, but for a long time it was a sleeping giant. More happened in crypto during the first 3 years of Ethereum’s existence than in the 7 years between Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s launch.
There are many ways to recap Ethereum’s 10 years: through the technological milestones, through the price cycles, through the scandals and the scams. Instead, we will take a look at Ethereum’s memorable moments through the eyes of users and the Ethereum community, and see how each chapter brought us closer to Ethereum becoming the global force it is today.
1. The Spark: White paper and ETH presale ICO
In 2008, Bitcoin came onto the scene quietly, known only to a small circle of computer scientists and cryptographers. Vitalik Buterin, the Canadian founder of Ethereum, became interested in Bitcoin when he was just 17 years old. His fascination grew quickly, so much so that he co-founded the Bitcoin Magazine in 2011. He was also busy taking a critical look at Bitcoin’s capabilities.
Permissionless, decentralized transfers of digital value which Bitcoin made possible were revolutionary in themselves. However, Buterin believed that cryptocurrency was capable of much more. He envisioned a global computer that not only supported crypto payments, but ran complex applications without the oversight of centralized organizations.
In November of 2013, when he was only 19, Buterin published the white paper that became the basis for Ethereum. Although he was initially joined by several co-founders including Joe Lubin, Charles Hoskinson, and Gavin Wood (all of whom went on to start their own crypto companies), disagreements in the group led to Buterin becoming the de-facto head of Ethereum in the summer of 2014. He was the one who established it as a non-profit foundation rather than a for-profit company, and he continues to provide active technical and philosophical leadership to the Ethereum community.
Ethereum raised funds through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), later to be emulated by countless projects in the space. Between July 22 and September 2 of 2014, more than $18 million of ETH tokens were purchased by investors, paid for in Bitcoin, at the price of about $0.31 per ETH. It took almost another year for Ethereum to launch. ETH holders couldn’t move their tokens during this time, but their foresight and patience were rewarded.
2. The Launch: Frontier, proof of work and smart contracts
Ethereum went live on July 30, 2015. The first implementation of the blockchain was appropriately called Frontier, and its main goals were to set up the Proof of Work consensus mechanism (like Bitcoin) and the hosting of smart contracts (the main feature that made Ethereum different from Bitcoin).
Smart contracts were Ethereum’s unique value proposition, and they proved themselves as such over and over again. The ERC20 token standard was established in November 2015, paving the way for thousands of token launches and laying the groundwork for everything that’s exciting about crypto today, including memecoins, stablecoins, yield farming, and tokenization of real world assets.
Ethereum started as a Proof of Work blockchain partly because it was a battle-tested model, demonstrated by Bitcoin to be secure and reliably decentralized. However, the intention for transition to Proof of Stake was built into Ethereum early on with the ‘difficulty bomb’. This was a planned exponential increase of mining difficulty that would eventually motivate network participants to switch over to Proof of Stake. For now, Frontier allowed the first miners to set up operations and start maintaining the blockchain. The decentralized Ethereum community began to emerge around the miners and the early adopters running Ethereum clients on their computers.
3. The DAO: rising to a challenge
“The DAO” was a Decentralized Autonomous Organization founded by a group of German Ethereum developers, led by Christoph Jents, with the purpose of crowdfunding resources that would be allocated to projects on Ethereum. Launched in April 2016, it quickly gained traction with the community, raising over $100 million by the middle of May 2016.
A DAO is a governance tool regulated by smart contracts on the blockchain, eliminating the need for a centralized authority. Members of a DAO don’t need to trust a board of directors, or each other, because the DAO code is transparent and available for all to review. Member incentives can be built into DAOs, encouraging them to behave fairly and rewarding them for fulfilling certain roles in the organization. To this day, DAOs play a big role in how the crypto space governs itself.
Back in 2016, the plan was for The DAO token holders to vote on projects they wanted to fund. However, over the few weeks of its existence, many concerns were raised about vulnerabilities in the smart contract that held the funds. While the developers were working on addressing these issues, an attacker exploited the vulnerability and drained 3.6 million ETH from The DAO in June 2016.
It’s important to understand that at the time, The DAO held about 15 percent of all ETH in circulation, so this had a big impact on the entire Ethereum network. It was hard to shrug off this kind of loss so early on. There were two main plans of action: doing a ‘soft fork’ to start a new branch of the blockchain and lock the stolen ETH in the abandoned branch without changing past transactions (proposed by Buterin), and doing a ‘hard fork’ to ‘unwind’ the theft, so that funds could be returned to all investors (proposed by the Ethereum Foundation).
Ultimately, 85 percent of network participants voted for the hard fork, to get the stolen ETH back. The fork was controversial because many saw it as a compromise of blockchain’s unchangeable, irreversible nature. Others believed that a massive loss of funds and confidence at this stage would irreparably damage the network’s future. Either way, The DAO hack was a significant foundational event for Ethereum. Despite the controversy, it demonstrated Ethereum’s ability to coordinate in the face of a crisis and, most importantly, keep the decisions in the hands of the decentralized community that keeps the blockchain running.
The DAO hack was the first massive attack on a smart contract vulnerability, but very far from being the last. Where there is money, there will be hackers and scammers, as every crypto user knows. The important part is how projects work to prevent vulnerabilities, and how they address inevitable exploits.
4. ICO Boom and first DeFi: Ethereum as we know it is formed
Up until this point, Ethereum was a very cool idea shared by a handful of enthusiasts, but it was about to go viral. Ethereum’s first growth spurt in 2017-2018 was fueled by a proliferation of projects that pursued funding through the Initial Coin Offering. Crowdfunding had never been so easy – no platforms to sign up for, no accounts to link, no financial paperwork, and no hoops to jump through. Needless to say, none of these projects would ever qualify for an actual IPO, but an ICO was a different story.
The smart contract and the ERC20 token standard had found their first undeniable use case. Ethereum’s ICO was still fresh in people’s minds. Now, tokens could be ‘printed’ on Ethereum as fast as you can say ‘wen moon’, and early tools like MyEtherWallet gave even the least technically inclined users a way to get in on the action.
This is when crypto acquired its ‘Wild West’ reputation, because a lot of ICOs ended up fizzling out or being rug pulls. Ethereum got its first taste of overload when the CryptoKitties collectibles game congested the network in December 2017, foreshadowing the solutions later presented by Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake and the Layer 2 ecosystem. The CryptoKitties hysteria also helped pave the way for the NFT token standard (ERC-721) in January 2018, adding another important building block to Ethereum’s future growth.
Today, the ICO hype is infamous in the crypto community. Having lived through it is one of the badges of honor for Ethereum OGs. Still, there was real gold in this gold rush. Some of the most influential networks and DeFi protocols got their start in 2017 and 2018: Aave, DAI by MakerDAO, BNB, Chainlink, 0x, Kyber network, Bancor, and Uniswap, to name a few. The DeFi ecosystem of today began to emerge.
5. DeFi Summer: Growth and Yield Farming
Sooner or later, the ICO bubble had to burst, but it laid the groundwork for a strong DeFi ecosystem. Markets had a rocky start to the year when Covid hit in March 2020, but several factors converged to make 2020 the year for a DeFi explosion.
By this point, Ethereum was starting to enjoy some network effects from the continuing development of multiple DeFi protocols and platforms. The composability of ‘DeFi Legos’ – a term used by members of the community to describe the way open-source crypto technology could be combined and recomposed in a multitude of ways – helped accelerate DeFi growth exponentially.
Ethereum reached 1 billion TVL (Total Value Locked) in February 2020. Compound, a decentralized lending protocol, launched its COMP token, and Yearn Finance, launched in July 2020, aggregated yield across all major existing platforms, making ‘yield farming’ the main pastime of DeFi Summer.
Just six months Ethereum hit 1 billion TVL, MakerDAO and Aave protocols hit 1 billion TVL each in July and August of 2020. Crucially, all this action was happening specifically on decentralized platforms, with SushiSwap, Paraswap, and 1inch coming into the DEX (decentralized exchanges) space to join Uniswap. In fact, Uniswap briefly surpassed Coinbase in trading volume in August 2020.
Even though DEX trading and yield farming was not for the faint of heart, with a steep learning curve and increasing risk depending on the protocols a user was ready to explore, it finally revealed the potential of Ethereum to a wider public. Stories of eye-popping yields attracted more and more enthusiasts to the space. The world saw DeFi and it was beautiful.
6. ETH 2.0: The setup for the Merge
All this ICO, TVL, and DEX action was nice and all, giving Ethereum some much needed growth, but the Ethereum developer community was still doing what it does best: building, head down, regardless of the hype and the price.
Let’s take a moment to talk about the Ethereum developers. It is not surprising to see hundreds of projects popping up where each team is expecting to make lots of money either from the token sale or (hopefully) from the product itself. It’s more impressive to see a handful of developers, spread out across the world, speaking different languages and only meeting online, devote year after year of work to support and improve the infrastructure that makes all the money-making possible.
Ethereum’s developer community has always been the largest and most active of all the blockchains by far, as measured by activity on code platforms like Github. Compared to the blockchains that are getting some developer attention now, like Solana and Base, Ethereum is of course the most long-lived and established, with the most uninterrupted up-time. As far as smart contract development goes, Ethereum devs are the grown ups in the room.
When the hype was hyping in 2017 and 2018, when the space was recovering from the ICO bubble, and when DeFi Summer was raging, the Ethereum community was getting ready for Ethereum’s biggest move yet – the transition to Proof of Stake, also known as ETH 2.0. Changing to Proof of Stake would dramatically reduce Ethereum’s energy usage, make it more scalable and sustainable, and reduce the barrier to entry for network participants.
The first step in making this happen would be enabling ETH staking which would support the Beacon Chain. On October 14, 2020 the staking deposit contract was launched on the Ethereum mainnet. The plan was to ship Beacon Chain on December 1, but in order to do so securely, the staking contract needed to accumulate 16384 deposits of 32 staked ETH by that date. The entire Ethereum community was watching the contract. The popular block explorer Etherscan had a tracking widget that was counting off deposited ETH.
This moment was a real test of faith in Ethereum’s Proof of Stake future, because ETH staked at this time would be locked in the contract for an unknown time, likely for several years. If something went wrong, it might not become available ever again. And yet, slowly but surely, then faster, the counter on the Etherscan widget was filling up, and on November 27th it was done. Beacon Chain Genesis started producing blocks on December 1, 2020.
7. NFT Craze: Crypto emerges into the very public eye
In the winter of 2021, pandemic restlessness, increased screen time, and rising crypto prices combined to produce a perfect storm of NFT obsession. As people were deprived of their in-person lives, they started looking at digital identity and ownership more closely. So did celebrities and athletes, looking for ways to interact with fans online instead of in concert halls and stadiums.
NBA Top Shot, a collection of NFTs featuring NBA game moments created by Dapper Labs (of CryptoKitties fame), exploded in February 2021, doing over $200 million in sales in March. As if that wasn’t enough, NFTs got a taste of old-money recognition when Beeple, a digital artist who was becoming known for his NFT art, sold an NFT at Christie’s for $69 million. The Crypto Punks $11.75 million Sotheby’s sale later in the year paled in comparison, though it would have been impossible to imagine any of this just six months prior.
And then the real power players entered the chat – celebrities like Eminem, Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Madonna, and Jimmy Fallon aped into Bored Apes. The NFT started making appearances at the American holy grail of mainstream exposure– the late-night talk show. So when Visa (yes, the credit card company) bought a Crypto Punk for $150,000, no one was surprised anymore.
NFT trading platforms took their turn in the sun, after DEXes and yield farming protocols. OpenSea monthly volume grew 400x between January and August 2021, and grew 646x overall from 2020 to 2021. Other marketplaces like Rarible and SuperRare provided additional infrastructure for NFT releases. Minting an NFT on the blockchain could get expensive on Ethereum, so this was also a time when other networks (known as sidechains or Layer 2s) like Polygon and Binance chain provided much needed relief from Ethereum’s transaction fees. But more on that later.
8. The Merge: Successful PoS transition
Remember ETH 2.0 and Ethereum developers? After seven years of building, The Merge was set for September 15, 2022. The process would merge the Ethereum Mainnet, running Proof of Work, with the Beacon Chain, the parallel Proof of Stake chain running since December 2020. The revolution was televised. The Ethereum Foundation hosted a live-streamed viewing party, following along in real time.
In the run-up to The Merge, the panda became its unofficial symbol, because of the color combination – a black and a white bear were coming together to form one super cute creature. The symbolism made the highly technical event more accessible for the less technical users, and played into the lighthearted meme culture that came to characterize Ethereum. During the livestream, at the moment The Merge happened, the image of pandas with ‘POS Activated’ came up on the screen, greeted by cheers all across the world.
It’s important to understand that in a crypto world of hundreds of blockchains, Ethereum is the only one to successfully complete a full, decentralized transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. This was a tremendous achievement and a testament to Ethereum’s unique strengths – stability of the network, a dedicated builder community, capable leadership, and proven technology. As a result of The Merge, Ethereum’s energy usage was reduced by over 99 percent and it was in a much better position to scale and support Layer 2 networks.
A common misconception at the time of The Merge was that staked ETH would be unlocked immediately. Actually, an additional upgrade called Shapella in April 2023 finally made staked ETH available for withdrawal. Some observers feared that this would precipitate a large outflow of staked ETH and threaten the security of the network, but that did not happen. Once again, the Ethereum community and users were steadfast in their commitment to Ethereum. In fact, the ability to stake and withdraw ETH at any time only made the DeFi ecosystem stronger and encouraged the creation of new DeFi instruments like restaking.
9. Layer 2 Explosion: The scaling path becomes clearer
The further one gets in Ethereum’s roadmap, the more fascinating it is to see how much of it was envisioned by Buterin and the core developers from very early on. One of the major criticisms directed at Ethereum ever since the days of CryptoKitties was whether it would ever be able to handle a high volume of transactions, and that the network transaction fees, known as ‘gas’, were too high.
Ahhhh, gas. Anyone who ever sent a transaction on Ethereum has a fraught emotional relationship with gas. What do you mean I need to have ETH to send a completely different token? How do I know how much ETH? Wait, how much did you say???!!! Where do I get this ETH in the first place?
While gas fees have been a constant source of frustration and confusion for Ethereum users, it was never the plan for Ethereum fees to become extremely low. When there is literally a higher price to doing things directly on a blockchain, it is less susceptible to spamming and attacks. Instead of Ethereum getting cheaper, it would become the security Layer 1 to other networks that would build off the EVM code (Ethereum Virtual Machine) to be compatible with Ethereum and each other. These networks would become known as Layer 2s.
The problem of scalability became apparent and made headlines with CryptoKitties in 2017, but the first truly popular Layer 2s were Optimism and Arbitrum, both launching mainnets in the summer of 2021. (Polygon and Binance chain that were helpful during the NFT craze are technically ‘sidechains’ rather than Layer 2s, though they are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The distinction is technical, but both sidechains and Layer 2s help with Ethereum scalability.)
It was not until the summer of 2023 that the Layer 2 ecosystem really came into its own and made the vision of Ethereum scalability more apparent. Earlier that year, Optimism introduced its Superchain platform, which made it easier for projects to build their own custom Layer 2 EVM-compatible networks. Arbitrum airdropped its tokens in March 2023, boosting participation in that network. The major Layer 2s, based on Ethereum, were themselves becoming hubs for other Layer 2s and Layer 3s.
The L2 Summer was the peak of the Layer 2 explosion, precipitated by the launch of exchange giant Coinbase’s own L2 platform Base. With the enormous number of users that Coinbase already had, the Base network burst onto the scene and immediately rose up to become one of the top networks by DeFi total value locked, number of applications, number of contracts, and other parameters. With Onchain Summer, Layer 2s (even if not called by that actual name) became part of mainstream crypto awareness.
10. DeFi x TradFi: Ethereum gets official
By 2024, Ethereum and crypto generally had been in the public eye for a while, with lawmakers and institutions giving an occasional nod of recognition – but the whole thing remained a situationship, at best. Lack of clear legislation and a rising number of attacks from the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) on various crypto projects made it difficult to build for the future. A lot of that changed with the election of President Donald Trump in the United States.
Though he was not always supportive of crypto in the past, during the election President Trump was seen as a pro-crypto candidate, and his pro-crypto stance grew even more pronounced after the election. The launch of his own memecoin, while controversial, helped generate a lot more awareness about crypto and may have legitimised it in the eyes of those who have never considered it before. Pressure on Gary Gensler, the strongly anti-crypto head of the SEC, led to his resignation, and other pro-crypto legislators in Washington were able to make more progress in this new crypto-friendly environment.
The combination of friendlier regulation and an increasing understanding of crypto and stablecoin utility by banks and institutions led to a domino effect of DeFi x TradFi fusion. For Ethereum specifically, one of the first indicators of institutional interest and acceptance was when BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset management firms, launched its tokenized fund on the Ethereum blockchain in March 2024.
The first Ethereum spot ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) was approved in July 2024, giving ETH an official place in the traditional markets. Since then, many more Ethereum ETFs have been created alongside Bitcoin ETFs, with crypto ETF inflows consistently hitting new highs as institutional interest grows. Finally, just in time for Ethereum’s anniversary, the GENIUS Act became the first major crypto legislation passed by Congress and signed into law in July 2025. It establishes a regulatory framework for the $250 billion stablecoin market, opening the door to stablecoin innovation in both DeFi and TradFi instruments.
What’s next? Stablecoins and real world asset tokenization, both largely dependent on EVM-based blockchains, are the next big thing for traditional finance. Institutions and governments are now awake to the ways crypto can make everything faster, cheaper, and accessible to global markets that were previously untapped. USD-based stablecoins (and that’s pretty much all of the stablecoins) have the potential of making the US dollar, and thereby the US economy, even more powerful in the global financial ecosystem. With these considerations, the current value of crypto generally and Ethereum specifically is a drop in the ocean of the possible.
To be continued…
Doing justice to Ethereum’s incredible progress over the past 10 years, not to mention its contribution to the crypto space as a whole, is far beyond the scope of this little story. There is, perhaps, no other project in the world that has had so many people from very diverse backgrounds working on a single vision for so long – without salaries, managers, or promotions.
A few hundred people who only knew each other by their Github handles put their faith, time, and resources into a side project. Now, that ‘project’ holds $80 billion in TVL and supports a sprawling infrastructure for stablecoins, tokenization, institutional investment, real world assets, and much, much more – just as Buterin envisioned in 2013. We can only guess what the next 10 years will bring.