TODAY IN CRYPTO HISTORY

It’s been 12 years (or 144 months) since Vitalik Buterin announced the concept of Ethereum.

What started as a personal project in 2013 and was officially announced on this day in 2014, finally came to fruition in 2015 with the launch of the blockchain.

Here are some curious facts about this you might have missed…

Created by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum introduced a revolutionary blockchain platform with smart contract functionality, paving the way for decentralized applications (dApps). It was conceived in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin and he published a white paper outlining the concept of Ethereum in late 2013, which led to the formal announcement of the project at the North American Bitcoin Conference on this day (24 January) in 2014.
Development began shortly after, and the network went live on July 30, 2015. At the time, Vitalik was a young programmer at the time, who co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and actively worked on Bitcoin. He proposed smart contracts as a Bitcoin upgrade, but that wasn’t met with much enthusiasm by his fellow Bitcoin developers. They were concerned about the complexity and potential risks associated with implementing such features on the existing Bitcoin protocol. He realised that a new platform was necessary to fully realize his vision. This led to the development of Ethereum, which was designed from the ground up to facilitate smart contracts and decentralized applications.
The idea was to create a blockchain not just for currency but as a world computer – one that could execute contracts automatically based on code, without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference. Up to this point, there were several other cryptocurrencies, mainly copies and forks of Bitcoin enhancing speed, but not offering innovation.

Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into code. They automatically enforce and execute the terms of a contract between parties on the blockchain. It had never been done before and thus, Ethereum is the first true innovation since Bitcoin.

Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency, #Ether, was introduced to pay for transaction fees and computational services on the network. This concept of “gas” allowed for a more versatile use of the blockchain.

The Ethereum project gained significant traction after its announcement. A crowdfunding campaign in July 2014 raised over $18 million, showcasing the community’s faith in Buterin’s vision. It was a very small community still. At this point 90% of today’s crypto investors were completely oblivious to any of these developments. Ethereum’s launch with the Frontier release in July 2015 marked the beginning of Blockchain2.0, where #blockchain technology wasn’t just about financial transactions but about decentralizing the internet itself. Web3 was not even a term yet. Barely even a concept.

In June 2016, Ethereum launched its first DAO which had a very rocky start and became a major hurdle for the network.
A hacker exploited a vulnerability in The DAO’s smart contract, stealing 3.6 million ETH (worth ~$150 million). To recover the stolen funds, the Ethereum developers implemented a hard fork, reversing the hack. This decision was taken after a community vote that split the community into two camps: those who voted that code is law and no change is acceptable, under no circumstances, and those who were in favour of rolling back the chain and invalidating the stolen coins. This also split the blockchain into two: Ethereum (ETH), which followed the rollback, and Ethereum Classic (ETC), which upheld the original chain. The incident highlighted smart contract risks and led to debates on blockchain immutability and governance. In effect, ETC carries on the legacy of the original Ethereum (hence the name – Classic), but the fork has become the dominant chain, much like BTC today (after its 2017 Segwit fork).

Over the years, Ethereum has faced numerous challenges including scalability issues and high gas fees during peak usage. However, it has also pioneered solutions like Ethereum 2.0, aiming for better scalability, security, and sustainability through Proof of Stake. It has undergone several major upgrades: Constantinople, Istanbul, London, Shanghai, The Merge, Dencun and others, to fix those scaling issues and reduce transaction fees, speed and even introducing deflationary model (to some extend). The most significant change was the transition from POW to POS back in 2022 which reduced energy consumption by approximately 99.95%, making the network more sustainable.

Today, Ethereum stands as one of the largest and most influential blockchains, powering hundreds of thousands dApps, Tokens, and NFTs. Its impact on the tech world and beyond is undeniable, and it’s all stemming from an idea announced exactly 12 years ago on this day.

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