The history of Ethereum began more than a decade ago as a gleam in the eye of its creator, Vitalik Buterin, a gangly math genius frustrated by the limitations of Bitcoin who believed he could do something better with a blockchain.
Instead of cryptocurrency being solely a monetary asset, Buterin envisioned extending blockchain technology to the point where it became a “global computer” — a platform that hosts decentralized applications, powered by smart contracts, with minimal need for human intervention or trust assumptions.
Fast forward to today, and Ethereum is the second-largest crypto asset in the world, underpinning a trillion-dollar ecosystem of dependent networks. It’s the blockchain of choice for several of the world’s largest asset managers, as well as hundreds of thousands of daily users on the layer 1 and millions on connected L2s.
Here are 11 of the most important moments in Ethereum’s history and some of the big upgrades to look forward to.
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin with his father, Dmitry.
The Ethereum white paper — 2013
Buterin was first introduced to Bitcoin in his late teens by his father, a Russian-born engineer who immigrated with his family to Canada.
With little in the way of funds to invest in Bitcoin mining or the asset itself, Buterin worked as a crypto blog writer and received payments in BTC during the early 2010s.
Noticing his talent as a leading thinker and author in the field, Romanian Bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie approached him, and the pair launched Bitcoin Magazine in 2012.
The first page of the Ethereum white paper. (Ethereum.org)
A year later, in 2013, when he was just 19 years old, Buterin published the Ethereum white paper outlining a “next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform.” The aim was simply to fix Bitcoin’s “too limited functionality” he told Business Insider:
“Think of the…
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