The History of Ethereum: From Idea to Global Computer

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.

The history of Ethereum begins 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.

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.

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 difference between something like a pocket calculator and a smartphone, where a pocket calculator does one thing and it does one thing well, but really people want to do all these other things. And if you have a smartphone then on the smartphone you have a pocket calculator as an app. You have playing music as an app. You have a web browser as an app and pretty much everything else.”

He was later awarded $100,000 by the Peter Thiel Fellowship to begin working on the Ethereum platform.

The Red Wedding — 2014

Before Ethereum became what it is today, it suffered through some growing pains and conflict, the first major one being the infamous “Red Wedding” — where the future of the network was thrown into the hands of Buterin.

As Camila Russo documented in her book, The Infinite Machine, the team of co-founders had gathered in Zug, Switzerland on June 7, 2014, to sign a document that would transform Ethereum into a for-profit company.

But instead of signing the contract, tensions concerning Charles Hoskinson’s management style, Amir Chetrit’s contributions to the project and Ethereum’s future direction reached a boiling point.

The call for which way Ethereum should go was left to Buterin, who moved to oust Hoskinson (who went on to create Cardano) and Chetrit and establish Ethereum as a nonprofit foundation instead of a company.

“We had differences of opinion, at times, those differences of opinion boiled over famously… infamously,” fellow Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin told Magazine in 2023.

ICO and launch — 2014

The next major step for Ethereum was raising capital and sparking widespread public awareness during its initial coin offering in 2014, selling millions of dollars worth of ETH to fund the development of the project.

Between July 22 and Sept. 2, 2014, the ICO saw investors snap up more than $18 million worth of ETH, which they paid for with BTC.

The Ethereum blockchain and its native token, ETH, were officially launched on July 30, 2015.

ETH hit the market with a value of $0.31 per ETH token, marking an impressive 1,057,000% return for anyone lucky enough to hold their ETH until today’s price of $3,275.

Nobody knows for sure, of course, but Ethereum and Consensys co-founder Joe Lubin is rumored to have invested more in the ICO than anyone else.

The DAO hack and Ethereum Classic — 2016

Arguably the most formative event in Ethereum’s history was the now-infamous hack of The DAO, an exploit where hackers stole more than 3.6 million ETH from the early, idealistic The Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

The attack sent shockwaves through the market, sending the price of ETH plummeting from $20 to $9 in less than 36 hours.

Divided on how to proceed in the wake of the attack, the