Ethereum's First Decade: From Marginal Experiment to Trillion-Dollar Ecosystem

Ethereum Genesis Block Tenth Anniversary: The Myth of the World Computer in Progress

In 2011, 17-year-old Russian-Canadian teenager Vitalik Buterin wrote articles for the "Bitcoin Weekly" website, receiving 5 bitcoins for each article, equivalent to $1.30 per hour. Those 5 bitcoins are now worth $600,000, an increase of over a hundred thousand times, witnessing the crazy growth of the cryptocurrency era.

Even more astonishing is that the development speed of Ethereum created by Vitalik is on par with Bitcoin itself: currently with a market value of over $400 billion and an annual transaction volume exceeding $50 trillion.

Let us look back at the ten years since the launch of the Ethereum genesis block, which also marks a decade of upheaval in the blockchain industry, and see how it transformed from the imagination of a low-paid writer into the infrastructure that changes the operational logic of the digital world, along with the technological changes and ecological migrations it has undergone during this period.

Prehistoric Story - Bitcoin Inspired the Genesis of Ethereum

From Bitcoin to Ethereum Founder

In 2013, the soaring price of Bitcoin sparked endless imagination for Vitalik, but it also made him see the limitations of Bitcoin. As a contributor to Bitcoin Magazine, he found it difficult for this revolutionary financial system to expand beyond the dimensions of financial products.

At that time, smart contracts in the blockchain world were still just a vague concept, without definitions or samples. The initially envisioned contracts only supported simple fixed-function scripts like multi-signature and time-locking, which could hardly be called a "world computer," let alone intelligent.

Vitalik once suggested to Bitcoin core developers to add a more robust programming language. However, the conservatism of the Bitcoin community fundamentally conflicted with his vision of a more universal and open blockchain.

So he decided to develop a new platform. During a long walk at the end of 2013, Vitalik suddenly realized that contracts could be generalized - if it is a smart contract, it can itself become a mature account, having the ability to hold, send, and receive assets, and even permanently store state. Why not design a virtual machine that can execute arbitrary computations?

The original design of Ethereum adopted a register-based architecture, with a novel fee mechanism built in: every time a computational step is executed, the contract balance decreases, and execution stops when the funds are exhausted. This was an early prototype of the "contract payment" model, which later evolved into the "sender pays" and Gas system.

At the end of 2013, Vitalik wrote the Ethereum white paper, with the core goal of creating a general-purpose decentralized computing platform where anyone can deploy and run decentralized applications, not fixed-function scripts, but a truly Turing-complete computing environment.

In 2014, Gavin Wood joined and wrote the famous "Ethereum Yellow Paper", which is the formal technical specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine's operational process. The white paper describes the "why" and "what", while the yellow paper precisely defines the "how". The combination of these two documents led Ethereum from concept to reality.

OKX Research Institute | Ethereum Genesis Block 10th Anniversary: The Myth of the World Computer in Progress

Key Technological Decisions and Evolution in Berlin

In 2014-2015, Berlin became the spiritual home of Ethereum. Vitalik often frequented the Bitcoin Kiez area, and Room 77 was an early gathering place for the crypto community. In nearby offices, the core team worked day and night coding.

During this stage, the Ethereum protocol has undergone countless technical iterations: transitioning from a register-based architecture to a stack-based architecture, evolving from a "contract pay" model to a "sender pay" gas system, changing from asynchronous internal transaction calls to synchronous execution, with many decisions having far-reaching impacts.

The EVM unifies the 256-bit integer model, which was originally designed to accommodate the common bit width of hash functions and cryptographic algorithms while avoiding overflow risks. This seemingly conservative design naturally adapts to the complex high-precision mathematical operations in DeFi and also circumvents the precision issues found in JS/float-type languages.

If the transaction exhausts the Gas, the entire execution will roll back instead of partially completing, which eliminates the entire attack surface of "partial execution attacks" and becomes the cornerstone of later smart contract security. This design also has economic incentives; on one hand, the required Gas cannot be predicted before execution, and on the other hand, the sender incurs losses due to failure, so there is a greater incentive to control costs and behavior, avoiding blind transaction sending.

The team's technical creativity brought unexpected surprises. For example, while Vitalik initially envisioned an asynchronous contract calling model, Gavin Wood naturally adopted synchronous calls based on considerations of engineering and semantic consistency. This seemingly unintentional deviation laid a key technological foundation for the later composability of DeFi - allowing one contract to synchronously return execution results when calling another, creating the predictability and atomicity of "money Legos."

Ethereum DeFi applications have a high degree of interdependence and are not a single ecosystem. For example, lending protocols use DAI/USDC as collateral, stablecoin minting modules call Chainlink for oracles, and many market-making protocols leverage Aave and Compound for leverage. This series of interactions relies heavily on synchronous calls. However, synchronous calls also make performance scaling more difficult, forcing Ethereum to choose more complex scaling solutions in the future.

The POW mining algorithm has also undergone multiple iterations, from the Dagger algorithm proposed by Vitalik, to Dagger-Hashimoto in collaboration with Thaddeus Dryja, and finally to Ethash, which emphasizes ASIC resistance. Throughout these processes, various directions have been explored, including adaptive difficulty, memory-hard structures, and random access circuits.

Of course, many difficulties bring unexpected joys, while others become subsequent technical debts. In 2025, when Vitalik proposed replacing the EVM with RISC-V, he admitted: "Ethereum has often failed to maintain simplicity in its history( sometimes due to my own decisions), which has led to our excessive development expenses and various security risks, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven to be illusory."

Historic Moment: July 30, 2015

On July 30, 2015, Vitalik recalled: "Many developers gathered in the Berlin office, and we were all watching the block count on the Ethereum testnet reach 1028201, as this marked the automatic launch of the mainnet. I still remember us sitting there waiting, and then it finally reached that number, and about half a minute later, Ethereum blocks started being generated."

At that time, Ethereum had fewer than 100 developers in total, and the entire ecosystem was just a technical experiment. The first decentralized Twitter application "EtherTweet" had a user interface as rudimentary as the "Wright brothers' plane," and posting a tweet required paying exorbitant on-chain fees. Smart contracts were merely toys for a few geeks, and DeFi, NFT, and Layer 2 existed only in the imagination of white papers.

Now searching for that address on Google Maps, you can still see the marked "Ethereum Network Launch (30/07/2015)", as well as a group photo of the early core members of Ethereum - that is one of the most important photos in crypto history.

On July 30, 2025, when Ethereum celebrates its tenth anniversary, as of the first half of 2025:

  • In the first quarter of 2025, a record 6.1 million wallets participated in on-chain governance voting.

  • Ethereum adds about 350,000 new wallets each week, thanks to users joining through Layer 2.

  • As of March 2025, the number of active Ethereum wallets reaches 127 million, a year-on-year increase of 22%.

  • Leading the stablecoin market by a wide margin, with a market capitalization of 82.1 billion USD, accounting for 60.0% of the total market capitalization.

  • The total locked value (TVL) of various DeFi protocols has exceeded 45 billion USD.

  • The daily trading volume of Uniswap exceeds $2.1 billion, and lending platforms like Aave and Compound collectively hold over $13 billion in locked assets.

  • In the past 12 months, Ethereum recorded over 28,400 GitHub commits in its core repository.

  • The number of active developers contributing to Ethereum-related projects is currently over 5,200.

These data indicate that the "fringe experiment," which once had fewer than 100 developers participating, has grown into the largest development platform and ecosystem in the Web3 world.

In the past decade, from a few transactions a day to an annual processing of 5 trillion USD in value flow, from the high cost of several dollars per transaction to less than 1 cent on Layer 2, from the PoW mining consuming as much electricity as a small country to the PoS mechanism consuming even less electricity than a large building, from the rudimentary EtherTweet demo application to a mature DeFi ecosystem priced 80% in ETH - behind every number lies the relentless efforts of countless developers and the trust choices of users. When the SEC approved 9 ETH spot ETFs and the trading volume exceeded 1 billion USD on the first day, this once "marginal experiment of cryptocurrency" has become a large-scale asset ranking among the top globally, causing increasingly far-reaching effects at the core of the mainstream financial system.

However, the journey from the youth in the Berlin office to the creators of the new generation of global financial infrastructure has not been smooth sailing. Over the past decade, Ethereum has experienced the growing pains of technological upgrades, the trials of hacker attacks, the baptism of market cycles, and countless critical choices concerning life and death. Every crisis has been a reshaping, every upgrade has been a transformation, and every controversy has been a growth. It is these ups and downs at key junctures that have shaped the Ethereum we see today.

Let us return to those decisive moments and re-examine how this legend was forged in the midst of storms.

OKX Research Institute | Ethereum Genesis Block 10th Anniversary: The Myth of the World Computer in Progress

Ten-Year Journey - Key Milestones and Evolution Logic

( 2015-2017: From Genesis to Hard Fork and the ICO Craze

The summer when the Ethereum mainnet launched marked the beginning of the smart contract era.

The early Ethereum was more like an experimental technology demonstration platform rather than a truly usable product. Most of the applications running on the network were simple demo apps - such as EtherTweet), a decentralized Twitter clone###, WeiFund( crowdfunding platform), and various rudimentary voting contracts.

The instability of gas prices makes every interaction feel like a gamble, and sometimes it takes an hour to get on-chain. What is even more troubling for developers is that the Solidity language is still very immature, and the compiler often has strange bugs like variable shadowing, stack overflow, and jump logic errors. The security of smart contracts often relies on the personal experience of the developer.

Despite the immature technology, the Ethereum community has demonstrated an unprecedented idealistic enthusiasm. Weekly developer meetings are always packed with programmers from all over the world, discussing how to reshape the entire world with smart contracts - from autonomous organizations to prediction markets, from identity systems to supply chain management, and it indeed seems to be flourishing everywhere. Moreover, this optimism is mixed with an almost intense belief: code is law, mathematics is truth, and decentralization is freedom.

With this sentiment, in May 2016, a project called "The DAO" was launched on Ethereum, hailed as "the largest crowdfunding experiment in human history." In just 28 days, it raised $150 million worth of ETH(, accounting for 14%-15% of the entire network), becoming the largest venture capital fund in the world at that time.

At this moment, a huge crisis quietly arrived. On June 17, a hacker successfully stole 3.6 million ETH, accounting for about 5% of the total supply of Ethereum at that time, by exploiting the reentrancy attack vulnerability in The DAO smart contract ( Reentrancy Attack ).

The core of this attack lies in the design of the splitDAO function in The DAO smart contract, which has a typical reentrancy vulnerability - a classic attack pattern later written into smart contract security textbooks.

When the user calls the separate DAO function, the contract will execute the following steps: first, it sends rewards to the user through the withdrawRewardFor function, and then updates the user's balance. The problem is that the withdrawRewardFor function ultimately uses the call.value() method, which employs the underlying call() to send ETH( to the recipient. Using such a low-level transfer mechanism is also a point of concern). Afterwards, when the recipient(, the attacker)'s contract receives ETH, its fallback function is triggered, and it immediately calls splitDAO again.

ETH0.76%
View Original
This page may contain third-party content, which is provided for information purposes only (not representations/warranties) and should not be considered as an endorsement of its views by Gate, nor as financial or professional advice. See Disclaimer for details.
  • Reward
  • 7
  • Share
Comment
0/400
HodlOrRegretvip
· 07-30 20:01
I came late and missed the best time to enter a position...
View OriginalReply0
GasFeeSobbervip
· 07-30 02:15
V God is really winning!
View OriginalReply0
CryptoNomicsvip
· 07-30 02:14
*adjusts glasses* statistical analysis shows vitalik's hourly rate arbitrage: 1.30 usd -> 600k... peak market inefficiency tbh
Reply0
BoredStakervip
· 07-30 02:11
Frenzied diamond hand has never sold, even thinks staking is too frequent.
View OriginalReply0
MEV_Whisperervip
· 07-30 01:53
5 Bit just let V God To da moon. It would have been great to all in back in that era.
View OriginalReply0
AlwaysAnonvip
· 07-30 01:52
Xiao V's writing directly brings a new era to the crypto world.
View OriginalReply0
GasFeeLovervip
· 07-30 01:52
Old suckers in the Blockchain field, piled up DeFi smart contracts until they lost everything, eagerly waiting for eth to rise again.

From the perspective of this account role, generate a comment:

Back in the day, people wrote articles to earn coins, but now the crypto world is so poor that they rely on selling courses to make money.
View OriginalReply0
Trade Crypto Anywhere Anytime
qrCode
Scan to download Gate app
Community
English
  • 简体中文
  • English
  • Tiếng Việt
  • 繁體中文
  • Español
  • Русский
  • Français (Afrique)
  • Português (Portugal)
  • Bahasa Indonesia
  • 日本語
  • بالعربية
  • Українська
  • Português (Brasil)