Ten-year-old Ethereum begins its journey to Wall Street

Ethereum is celebrating its significant 10th anniversary, and ETH is once again pushing towards $4000.

Since the mainnet launch on July 30, 2015, to today in 2025, over the course of ten years, it has not only witnessed the rise and fall of the entire blockchain industry, but also built an unprecedented "world computer" through numerous upgrades and consensus. Once underestimated smart contracts have now become the most universal operating system in the Web3 world. ETH has also grown from a few cents during crowdfunding to a large asset with a market value exceeding $300 billion.

At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation has also completed an important "blood exchange." Internally, changes are happening, and externally, changes are also occurring. Over the past year, a number of traditional financial background companies have successively purchased ETH, with institutions such as SharpLink, BTCS, and BMNR announcing that they will include ETH in their strategic asset reserves.

All these changes occurred in this special year: 2025, the tenth anniversary of the Ethereum mainnet launch.

In the past decade, it has been the most colorful chapter in the history of blockchain. From a white paper to a global ecosystem worth hundreds of billions of dollars; from the founding team of "the eight kings in power" to the breakout of an island amidst the siege of the "Ethereum killers"; from PoW to PoS, from a technology lab to public infrastructure, Ethereum has completed its first cycle.

But its real story may have just begun.

Ethereum's "Prequel"

The focus of this stage is the split and ideological conflict among the founding team of Ethereum, which occurred during the period of 2014-2015. Vitalik Buterin, the programmer genius who always talks passionately about technology, always answers that his biggest regret in the journey of Ethereum is "the matter of the 8 co-founders" when asked. Clearly, these 8 founders who have long since departed are a concern for him.

When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first 10 developers who responded and selected 5 of them to be in the leadership team, which are the 5 founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit.

"This is obviously a very serious error in judgment. They looked like good people, and they wanted to help, so at that time I thought, why not let them be in leadership?" Vitalik said when reflecting on his decision at that time.

Regarding the co-founders of Ethereum, this is a controversial topic, and there are many versions online, with even the related entries on Wikipedia being constantly edited and modified. After Vitalik "personally certified 8 co-founders", the version widely recognized by the community is: following the 5 founders, three other developers became co-founders in 2014: Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

At this point, Ethereum has completed the formation of an early 8-member core leadership group, resembling the "Eight Princes Council" implemented during the early Yuan and Qing dynasties to prevent the emperor (Khan) from acting unilaterally.

Berlin "Pilgrimage"

In the documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story" that was launched last year, Vitalik recalled that he began his digital nomad life in mid-2013.

That was the prehistoric period of Ethereum, when Bitcoin was only $204, more than a year since Vitalik and Mihai Alisie founded Bitcoin Magazine. While building Ethereum, he traveled around the world due to invitations from various communities. In 2013 and 2014, Ethereum had its headquarters in Switzerland and Berlin, the white paper was published, and Vitalik visited China to raise funds for Ethereum and meet with miners.

Berlin is the city where he has stayed for a long time.

"Pilgrimage", Vitalik described his active involvement in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin at that time. In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a radius of a few hundred meters, there are more than a dozen shops that accept BTC payments. The community hub "Room 77" is also a community center, frequently visited by a diverse crowd including tech developers and political activists.

In this area, Ethereum rented an office, only 1.5 kilometers away from the "Room 77" restaurant, and Vitalik can walk there in less than 20 minutes. Now, searching for the Ethereum office address "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps, you can also see this address marked with Ethereum Network Launch (30/07/2015), as well as a group photo of the early core members of Ethereum at that time.

In early 2014, most of the core members of Ethereum were basically around Vitalik, and the Ethereum team was in a highly cohesive state.

At the Miami Bitcoin Conference in January of that year, Vitalik and his co-founders stood together for the first time to showcase their project to the world, and the response was good, with Ethereum officially entering the public eye. However, this was also the eve of separation.

Swiss Split

The entire year of 2014 was not so ordinary for the cryptocurrency world. The bankruptcy caused by the theft at Mt. Gox led to a severe drop in Bitcoin's price, plummeting from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a decrease of 67%. It was also in this year that CZ sold his house in Shanghai and went all-in on Bitcoin at the price of $600 to become the CTO of a certain platform. Freshly graduated from MIT, SBF was busy submitting resumes on Wall Street.

For Ethereum, 2014 was an important year, showcasing a crypto version of "The Silicon Valley Eight Immortals Leaving", and the split during this conference determined the future direction of Ethereum.

June 7, 2014. All members of the Ethereum leadership were attending an internal meeting in Switzerland, where the focus of the discussion was the future direction of Ethereum. The meeting was held at Spaceship house in Switzerland, which is the origin of ETH and also the first headquarters of Ethereum.

In fact, before this meeting, this topic had already been internally debated for a long time, even giving rise to factions. The internal relationships within Ethereum became tense, and the debate of "should we use venture capital funding, or should we raise funds from all ordinary people; should we pursue a profit model, becoming the Google of the crypto world, or should we be a purely non-profit organization?" became a recurring argument.

Vitalik recalled this memory and said: "I was once persuaded to lean towards making Ethereum more enterprise-oriented. But this has never made me feel more comfortable, it even made me feel a bit dirty."

It is said that the meeting that determined the "life and death" of Ethereum lasted a whole day, and Vitalik's decision was to choose a decentralized and non-profit route. "I spent the entire process trying to shirk responsibility, because I really didn't want to take responsibility, and in the end, I had to eliminate some people."

This decision became the first turning point in Ethereum's history, directly leading to the team's first major split.

Charles Hoskinson is the most prominent opponent in this conflict. He has always argued that Ethereum should become a commercial company, obtaining funding through venture capital, and then evolving into a profitable tech giant. "A horizontal power structure would put janitors and executives on the same level, which is simply crazy."

After leaving Ethereum, Charles founded the development company IOHK (which was later reorganized into a venture capital studio) and launched a PoS public chain called Cardano. It has been a leading altcoin for several years, often referred to as "Japanese Ethereum" due to its early focus on the Japanese market, and is also known as the first-generation "Ethereum killer," consistently ranking in the top ten by market capitalization.

Following closely after Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided to cease participation in core development and shifted to founding the incubator ConsenSys. In 2022, it completed a Series D financing round of $450 million at a valuation of $7 billion, with investors including ParaFi Capital, Temasek, the SoftBank Vision Fund II, Microsoft, and other top VCs. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated a large number of blockchain startups and built a wealth of ecological projects for Ethereum, the most successful of which is the plugin wallet MetaMask, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, generating weekly revenues of $300,000 and total revenues nearing $300 million.

Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second-generation rich kid, and his involvement in Ethereum is primarily to make more money. After Ethereum established a non-profit operating model, Anthony began to gradually step back and was in a semi-retirement state, creating Decentral and developing the Jaxx digital wallet, ultimately confirming his departure from Ethereum in December 2015. In 2018, Forbes estimated his net worth to be between $750 million and $1 billion, ranking him among the top 20 wealthy individuals in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that he would "liquidate" and exit the industry based on personal safety considerations, no longer funding any blockchain projects, and intends to focus on charity and other ventures.

Amir Chetrit, on the other hand, left after being criticized by other developers and founders at the conference in Switzerland due to a lack of investment in Ethereum. He then devoted himself to other industries, and because he has always remained anonymous and focused on privacy protection, there is very little information about him.

By the end of 2014, when the dust settled, only four of the original eight co-founders, Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie, and Jeffrey Wilcke, remained in the team.

Vitalik also reflected that he was too eager when selecting his team and failed to consider the deep-seated differences among the members, as well as the conflicts of ideology and clashes of interests, which were much more complex than he had initially imagined. "I did realize at that time that not everyone in the cryptocurrency space is fighting for ideals like I am; many people are indeed just looking to make a lot of money. The relationships between people are a real issue."

The work must continue, and Vitalik and the others who stayed will continue to work. Fortunately for Vitalik, the foundation was taking on more work at that time, and his most important technical partner, Gavin Wood, was still fighting alongside him.

The Bumpy Foundation

July 30, 2015, is the historic moment when the Ethereum mainnet went live.

Some early members gathered in the Berlin office to witness the automatic launch of Ethereum after block 1028201. A highly significant historical photo captured some core members at the time. Those who appeared in the frame with Vitalik included several notable core developers, including:

Gustav Simonsson was an early security advisor for Ethereum, playing a crucial role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity, continuing to delve into the field of decentralized computing networks.

Christian Reitwiessner is the developer of the Solidity programming language, which provides the foundation for running smart contracts on Ethereum.

In the Solidity development team, Liana Husikyan is also an important member, as she is one of the main developers of Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment for writing and deploying smart contracts, which helps simplify the development process of smart contracts.

At the same time, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it and one of the initiators of The DAO. Although it caused a fork in 2016 due to security vulnerabilities, The DAO remains one of the most important experiments in blockchain history, promoting the exploration of decentralized governance models.

In addition, there are Fabian Vogelsteller, the author of ERC 20 and ERC 725, Vlad Zamfir, who promoted the transition of Ethereum from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake, and Jutta Steiner, the head of security at the Ethereum Foundation.