Next Wednesday evening, July 30th, DHK dao will host an offline community gathering in Hong Kong for Ethereum’s 10th anniversary, celebrating with the global community. Space is limited, so please register as soon as possible if you are interested. Special thanks to the Ethereum Foundation for their sponsorship.
In 2015, the Hong Kong film Ten Years was released. Five young, emerging directors each contributed a short story, using their lens to depict their imagination of Hong Kong ten years later, in 2025. Ten Years was made on a shockingly small budget of HK$500,000. It grew from a limited release to a resonant phenomenon, awakening the deep-seated anxiety and fear in the hearts of Hong Kongers, eventually winning Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards and creating widespread impact. At the time, everyone thought the film used exaggerated expressions. A decade has passed, and only now do we realize that many of the film’s scenarios are far less absurd than reality.
Short-Term Impact vs. Long-Term Effect
Also happening in 2015, with a development a decade later that would prove unexpectedly far-reaching, was Ethereum—an event with an even wider and more profound impact. On July 30, 2015, Ethereum mined its genesis block, and at a pace that seemed slow but was in fact swift, it has progressively brought about irreversible changes across various domains such as finance, content, and collaboration.
The famous Amara’s Law states that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. In the eyes of many, Ethereum’s development has been slow. The vision of “the world computer” existed more than a decade ago, and we thought Web3 was coming seven or eight years ago. Yet, a simple game like CryptoKitties was enough to bring this “world computer” to a grinding halt. Coupled with the bear market, many lost faith in Ethereum and all blockchain-related technologies, subsequently leaving the space.
While the public’s attention and energy shifted to other fields like AI and VR, a group of people never gave up. They tilled the soil deeply, accumulating strength over time. By the time most people had all but forgotten Web3, the accumulation of small improvements gradually made blockchain practical. Applications like USDT quietly took deep root outside the view of mainstream media. The recent green light from the U.S. government was merely adding fuel to an already burning fire. Suddenly, the world realized it had drastically underestimated the impact of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins, most of which are issued on Ethereum.
And in the most difficult moments, facing skepticism from all sides, the one that stands out for always adhering to long-termism—never slowing its pace of development, never compromising its decentralization for short-term price adjustments or by cozying up to powerful nations—is, first and foremost, Ethereum.
A Brief History of Ether, One Step at a Time
To truly understand the history of Ethereum’s development would require reading hundreds of web pages. Below, I have divided the history of Ethereum since its conception into four acts—Genesis, Development, Transformation, and Convergence. For each year, I list the most significant event(s) to help readers quickly review how Ethereum, one step at a time, grew to the status it has today.
Act I: Genesis (The Whitepaper, The Crowdsale, The Launch)
- 2013 📜
Vitalik Buterin authors the Ethereum whitepaper, titled “Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform“.
- 2014 💰
The Ethereum crowdsale successfully raises 31,529 BTC, valued at approximately 18 million USD at the time, selling 60,102,216 ETH.
- 2015 🚀
On July 30, the Ethereum mainnet goes live with the mining of the genesis block. - 2016 💔
The DAO, a project on Ethereum, is exploited due to a vulnerability, resulting in the theft of 3.6 million ETH (worth ~$50 million USD). The community ultimately resolves this via a hard fork. The current Ethereum (ETH) is the forked chain that included code to recover the stolen assets. The original chain, which upheld “code is law” and accepted the theft, is now known as Ethereum Classic (ETC).
Act II: Development (ICO, Crypto Winter, DeFi)
- 2017 📈
The NFT standard (ERC-721) emerges, and CryptoKitties goes live. The ICO boom gives rise to numerous projects built on Ethereum. The Byzantium upgrade adjusts the mining reward from 5 ETH to 3 ETH.
- 2018 ❄️
The ICO bubble bursts, compounded by the Bitcoin four-year cycle effect. The price of ETH plummets from a high of 1,448 USD at the start of the year to a low of 84 USD by year’s end—a drop of over 90%. The Constantinople upgrade’s delay due to technical issues pushes Ethereum into a slump.
- 2019 🌱
The Constantinople & St. Petersburg upgrades occur early in the year, further reducing the mining reward to 2 ETH. The Istanbul upgrade at year’s end lays the groundwork for future L2s and zero-knowledge proofs. DeFi applications like Uniswap, Compound, and MakerDAO show early promise. The price of ETH begins to recover from its bottom.
- 2020 ☀️
Compound, Uniswap, Aave, Curve, and others launch liquidity mining programs, triggering the “DeFi Summer.” The world gets its first taste of the power of decentralized finance, which also highlights Ethereum’s low throughput and high gas fees, making L2 scaling an urgent necessity. The Beacon Chain goes live at the end of the year, initiating staking and marking the first step toward PoS.
Act III: Transformation (NFT, PoS, L2)
- 2021 🔥
The Berlin, London, and Altair upgrades. The London upgrade’s EIP-1559, successfully implemented despite opposition from miners, burns the base fee portion of transaction fees, reducing ETH’s supply and creating the potential for deflation. Arbitrum and Optimism L2 mainnets go live. PFP NFT projects like BAYC spark a speculative frenzy, pushing the price of ETH to an all-time high of 4,878 USD.
- 2022 🤝
The Merge upgrade. Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining is officially terminated as the network transitions to the new era of Proof-of-Stake (PoS), reducing energy consumption by over 99%. However, this technical breakthrough is accompanied by a harsh crypto winter. The collapse of Terra, the bankruptcy of FTX, and another Bitcoin four-year cycle cause ETH to dip below 1,000 USD at one point.
- 2023 🔓
The Shapella upgrade enables withdrawals of staked ETH, officially completing the final step of the PoS transition. L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism mature, while ZK-Rollup-based solutions like zkSync Era and StarkNet also launch on mainnet, moving from theory to practice.
- 2024 🍃
The Dencun upgrade’s EIP-4844 introduces temporary data storage blobs, causing L2 transaction fees to drop by 90%. Following the approval of Bitcoin ETFs, the U.S. SEC approves spot Ethereum ETFs, signaling that Ethereum is beginning to be accepted by national governments and traditional finance.
Act IV: Convergence (Merging with Traditional Finance, Smart Accounts, Mainstream Adoption)
- 2025 🏗️
The Pectra upgrade allows regular accounts to be converted into smart accounts and changes the validator stake from a fixed 32 ETH to a range of 32-2048 ETH, reducing the number of validators and easing the network’s communication load. On the market side, institutions begin to hold ETH as a reserve asset while also becoming validators to earn rewards.
Compared to the previous acts, the “Convergence” phase has only just begun. I don’t have a crystal ball, but based on years of participation and observation, I can confidently judge that the technical updates in the coming years will give Ethereum higher throughput, lower fees, and even greater decentralization. More importantly, as smart accounts are implemented in wallet software and dApps, creating and managing wallets will become increasingly simple, making the user experience much more approachable. Coupled with the recognition from governments, traditional finance, and large institutions, Ethereum will see large-scale mainstream adoption and become an indispensable piece of infrastructure.
To be continued
I already knew the history of Ethereum, but in the process of condensing this brief history and rereading a vast amount of material, I was still shaken by this incredible, epic journey. To have been a part of it, even as a small player, is a profound honor.
It’s impossible to talk about Ethereum’s 10th anniversary without using technical terms. I hope readers won’t again say, “I understand every word, but I don’t get it when you put them together.” On July 30th, the day of the anniversary, I will publish the second part of “A Decade for Ether, A Century for Humanity,” which will explore the humanistic aspects of Ethereum. Don’t miss it.
p.s. In March 2021, Marti Wong, the developer of Little Fighter 2, launched an LF2 NFT collection. I immediately bought the classic character #01 Davis, to support a friend and promote creativity. Over the next four-plus years, Marti diligently used the funds from the NFT sale to continue development day and night. Last week, he finally released Little Fighter 2 Remastered, which is now publicly available on Steam. Who says NFTs are only for speculation?
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