In 2015, the Hong Kong film Ten Years was released, with five young emerging directors using five short stories to depict an imagined Hong Kong in 2025. With a budget of only 500,000 Hong Kong dollars, the film went from a small-scale release to sparking resonance, awakening the buried anxiety and fear of Hong Kong people, and ultimately winning the Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards, creating widespread impact. At the time, everyone thought the film used exaggerated expression techniques, but ten years later, it became clear that many scenes in the film were far less absurd than reality.
Short-term Impact vs Long-term Effects
Also happening in 2015, another development that was unexpectedly different ten years later, with even broader and more far-reaching implications, was Ethereum. On July 30, 2015, Ethereum minted its Genesis Block, and with a seemingly slow but actually fast pace, gradually brought about irreversible changes in various aspects such as finance, content, and collaboration.
The famous Amara's Law points out that we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of a technology while underestimating its long-term effects. In many people's eyes, Ethereum's development was slow. It had the vision of a "world computer" more than a decade ago, and people thought web3 was coming seven or eight years ago. However, a small game like Cryptokitties could bring this "world computer" to a halt, and with the bear market, many people became disappointed with Ethereum or even blockchain-related technologies and left the scene.
While the public's attention and energy turned to other fields like AI and VR, a group of people never gave up, working diligently and accumulating strength. As everyone almost forgot about web3, gradual small improvements made blockchain more practical. Applications like USDT quietly took root outside mainstream media's view. The recent support from the US government was merely adding fuel to an already burning fire. Suddenly, the world discovered that it had vastly underestimated the impact of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins (mostly issued on Ethereum).
At the most difficult time, with multiple doubts, the standout who never slowed down development, did not adjust the development roadmap due to short-term price fluctuations, did not take shortcuts or compromise decentralization by aligning with powerful countries, and always adhered to long-termism, was primarily Ethereum.
Ethereum's Brief History, Step by Step
To deeply understand Ethereum's development history, one would need to read hundreds of web pages. Below, I divide Ethereum's history from its conception into four stages: origin, continuation, transition, and integration, listing the most important one to several major events each year to help readers quickly review how Ethereum has step by step developed to achieve its current success.
Origin: Whitepaper, Fundraising, Genesis
- 2013
Vitalik Buterin wrote the Ethereum whitepaper titled "Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform". - 2014
Ethereum crowdfunding successfully raised 31,529 BTC, with a market value of approximately $18 million, selling 60,102,216 ETH. - 2015
On July 30, the Ethereum mainnet went online, minting the Genesis Block. - 2016
The Ethereum-based project The DAO had a vulnerability, with 3.6 million ETH stolen, worth about $50 million. The community ultimately handled this through a hard fork, with the current Ethereum being the fork that added code to recover the stolen assets, while the original chain that adhered to "code is law" and accepted the theft became today's Ethereum Classic (ETC).
Continuation: ICO, Winter, DeFi
- 2017
The NFT standard (ERC-721) emerged, Cryptokitties launched; the ICO boom gave birth to many Ethereum-based projects; Byzantium upgrade reduced mining rewards from 5 ETH to 3 ETH. - 2018
The ICO bubble burst and Bitcoin's four-year cycle effect caused ETH price to drop from a high of $1,448 to a low of $84 by year-end, a decline of over 90%. The delayed Constantinople upgrade due to technical issues also pushed Ethereum into a low point. - 2019
Early Constantinople and St. Petersburg upgrades further reduced mining rewards to 2 ETH; the year-end Istanbul upgrade laid the foundation for future L2 and zero-knowledge proofs. DeFi applications like Uniswap, Compound, and MakerDAO began to emerge; ETH price rebounded from its bottom. - 2020
Compound, Uniswap, Aave, and Curve launched liquidity mining, triggering DeFi Summer, showcasing the power of decentralized finance and highlighting Ethereum's low throughput and high fees. L2 scaling became urgent; the Beacon Chain went online at year-end, marking the first step towards PoS.
Transition: NFT, PoS, L2
- 2021
Berlin, London, and Altair upgrades; London's EIP-1559 successfully coordinated miners' opposition, burning the base part of transaction fees, potentially reducing ETH supply. Arbitrum and Optimism L2 mainnet launched; BAYC and other avatar NFT projects sparked a heated frenzy, pushing ETH price to a historical high of $4,878. - 2022
The Merge upgrade officially ended Proof of Work (PoW) mining, entering the Proof of Stake (PoS) era, reducing energy consumption by over 99%. However, this technological breakthrough was accompanied by a price winter, with Terra's collapse, FTX's bankruptcy, and Bitcoin's four-year cycle causing ETH to drop below $1,000. - 2023
Shapella upgrade opened ETH staking withdrawals, completing the final step of the PoS upgrade. Arbitrum, Optimism, and other L2 solutions matured, while ZK-Rollups-based zkSync Era and StarkNet also launched their mainnets, moving from theory to practice. - 2024
Dencun upgrade, with EIP-4844 introducing temporary data storage space, reducing L2 transaction fees by 90%. The US SEC approved an Ethereum spot ETF after the Bitcoin ETF, symbolizing Ethereum's acceptance by national governments and traditional finance.
Integration: Merging with Traditional Finance, Smart Accounts, Entering the Public Domain
- 2025
Pectra upgrade allows regular accounts to convert to smart accounts, changing validator staking from a fixed 32 ETH to 32-2048 ETH, reducing validator numbers and network communication burden. Institutionally, ETH begins to be used as a reserve and for validation rewards.
