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CollectionsEthereum marks its anniversary

Ethereum marks its anniversary

On July 30, 2015, Ethereum went live. As it marks its anniversary, we look back at the personalities who created it, track how it's evolved over its history, and look forward to its future.

CollectionLast updated Oct 2, 2020
Aug 4
Ethereum is the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. Image: Shutterstock

Ethereum co-founder plans a social "super app" for dapps

Mihai Alisie is one of eight Ethereum co-founders—the only one who'd worked with Vitalik Buterin before he devised his "World Computer". In recent years, he's been less visible—but now, he's emerging into the limelight with a new project that promises to herald a sweeping, new, social era for Ethereum. Flashback to five years ago, in an odd-looking rented house on the outskirts of Zug in Switzerland: the Ethereum "Spaceship". Mihai Alisie, along with his fellow Ethereum cofounders, was was watc...

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7 min read
Adriana Hamacher
Jul 31
Ethereum 2.0 is on the horizon (Image: Shutterstock)

Ethereum: the next five years

Since its launch on July 30, 2015, Ethereum has risen to become the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization—second only to Bitcoin. It was the first, and until quite recently, the only general-purpose blockchain, featuring a Turing-complete virtual machine and native programming language able to use code of any algorithmic intricacy. Five years after its launch, there are around 200,000 active developers building on Ethereum, with exciting developments such as decentralized finan...

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6 min read
Rene Millman
Jul 30
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality (Image: Shutterstock)

Happy 5th Birthday Ethereum: this is your life

In 2009, game developer Blizzard released an update for the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. Among the patch notes was a statement informing players that the spell ‘Siphon Life’ would no longer cause damage. The link between this seemingly innocuous event and the birth of one of the decade’s most important tech breakthroughs? A man called Vitalik Buterin—the founder of Ethereum. “I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed t...

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7 min read
Esat Dedezade
Jul 29
Ethereum has a wide variety of use cases across different industries (Image: Shutterstock)

Three of the biggest companies building on Ethereum

Ethereum, the largest blockchain network for decentralized applications, and home to the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is turning five. Since its launch in 2015, Ethereum has attracted some of the largest companies in the world. Countless multinationals, Fortune 100 companies—pick your benchmark of prestige—are building on it. Many companies started looking into Ethereum at the height of the 2017 ICO boom, when Bitcoin spiked to near $20,000 (and Ethereum didn’t fare too badly, pe...

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8 min read
Robert Stevens
Jul 28
Ethereum launched on July 30, 2015. Image: Shutterstock

Who are Ethereum’s co-founders and where are they now?

At a fateful meeting in Zug, Switzerland, on June 7, 2014, Ethereum’s eight cofounders gathered together in a rented house in the woods, dubbed “the spaceship,” to decide the future of what was to become the world’s second-biggest blockchain platform.  They never did sign the document incorporating Ethereum, which is what had brought them there in the first place—the blockchain platform remains a non-profit. Instead, two stepped down from their active roles. But, from that point on, all eight w...

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9 min read
Adriana Hamacher
Jul 27
DeFi is now a $3 billion industry (Image: Shutterstock)

Is Ethereum's DeFi boom sustainable in the long term?

In recent weeks, we’ve seen a boom in decentralized finance (DeFi). ​Recent data​ have shown that total DeFi users have grown by 23% since the start of June, while over ​$2 billion​ worth of Ethereum and Bitcoin is now locked up in DeFi. And transaction volume across Ethereum-based DeFi dapps has increased by nearly 800% since April. It's driven by the rise of yield farming, in which DeFi platforms offer token incentives in exchange for users' deposits. It’s led to ​unintended consequences​ as...

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6 min read
Rene Millman
Jul 14
Vitalik Buterin was just 19 when he wrote the Ethereum white paper. Image: Flickr

The incredible story of Ethereum, “The Infinite Machine”

Five years after Ethereum’s launch, the blockchain platform is making history—literally. The first published history of Ethereum, The Infinite Machine, hits the shelves of bookstores today.  Written by former Bloomberg journalist Camila Russo, it tells the story of how 19-year-old coding genius Vitalik Buterin led a “ragtag group of feuding hackers with no business plan and no live product” to pioneer a whole new way of raising money, on a platform that’s grown to a value of $27 billion. Ethere...

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7 min read
Adriana Hamacher