A big Happy (belated) 9th Birthday. Yes it has been 9 years since Ethereum went public with Frontier.
My apologies for being so late but it has taken a lot of research to put together this tribute to the Ethereum project. The undisputed number two cryptocurrency and blockchain.
Vitalik Buterun And Ethereum
As an early Bitcoiner, Vitalik Buterun was working on Mastercoin in 2013. Mastercoin was the first altcoin, was built on the Bitcoin blockchain. Later Mastercoin was rebranded to Omni.
Note: Tether was first created on the Omni protocol in October 2014.
Vitalik Buterun published the Ethereum whitepaper in November 2013. The whitepaper describing Ethereum’s purpose - to serve as a platform for decentralized applications (dapps).
Buterin, along with co-founders Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke, formally announced the start of the Ethereum project in early 2014.
The Ethereum project’s development was funded by an ICO in 2014, raising over $18 million.
The first public release of Ethereum, known as Frontier, occurred in July 2015. Hence the 9th birthday.
Milestones And Memories
Nick Szabo, an American computer scientist, digital currency researcher and cryptographer, introduced the concept of smart contracts in 1994. Nick also proposed Bit Gold in 1998, as a decentralized virtual currency.
In 2016, 3.6 million ETH were stolen due to a vulnerability in the Ethereum DAO's code. This led to a controversial decision to perform the first major hard fork, resulting in the creation of two separate chains: Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
The first CryptoKitty was born on 2nd December 2017. The game's popularity in December 2017, congested the Ethereum network, causing it to reach an all-time high in the number of transactions and slowing it down significantly. CryptoKitties is a blockchain game developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs. The game allows players to buy, sell, and breed digital cats with unique attributes using Ethereum.
With the Beacon Chain upgrade in 2022, Ethereum transitioned from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
Purpose Investments, CI Global Asset Management, and Evolve ETFs began trading of their Ethereum EFTs on April 20, 2021.
Three years later, Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust (ETH), Franklin Ethereum Trust (EZET), VanEck Ethereum Trust (ETHV), Bitwise Ethereum ETF (ETHW), 21Shares Core Ethereum ETF (CETH), Fidelity Ethereum Fund (FETH), iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) and Invesco Galaxy Ethereum ETF (QETH) begin trading in the US.
Ethereums Co-Founders
In the beginning there were 5, then 8, now there is only one.
“They were all huge personalities, huge egos, some more than others.” Camila Russo
Gavin Wood:
was the first to get an Ethereum testnet up and running. In April 2014, Gavin published the Ethereum Yellow paper, a technical specification of Vitalik’s white paper. Gavin later proposed Ethereum’s native programming language Solidity.
Gavin continued to work on the Ethereum code, via his company Parity, which he founded with his partner Jutta Steiner. But now he is solely focussed on the Web3 Foundation, and its interoperability blockchain project Polkadot.
“He really does believe that he was a main builder of Ethereum, and arguments do support that. He believes that he had an even more important role in Ethereum than Vitalik—to some extent.” Camila Russo
Jeffrey Wilcke:
a computer programmer was working on the Mastercoin, when he heard about Ethereum. Jeffrey was so excited that he decided to secretly write an implementation of it in Google’s Go language .
Jeffrey begun his software implementation, at roughly the same time as Wood began his version on C++.
He was added to the founders roster alongside Gavin Wood in early 2014.
Jeffrey started Grid Games with his brother Joey. Grid Games is a games development studio. Jeffrey sold some of the ether he received from Ethereum to fund development of Grid Games.
Mihai Alisie:
was a graduate in Cybernetic Economics. Mihai was making a living coaching and playing poker in his home country Romania, when he heard about Bitcoin. He got in touch with Buterin in 2011, and they decided to set up Bitcoin Magazine, and then worked together on Egora, a decentralized eBay for Bitcoin.
Alisie helped to establish Ethereum’s Swiss base, incorporating the initial startup, opening a bank account for the fledgling crypto company, and dealing with lawyers and Swiss officials on the legal framework critical for the ICO.
“In the early days this was just a bunch of people with great ideas and grand ambition.” Mihai Alisie
Mihai was vice-president of the Ethereum Foundation until late 2015.
Anthony Di Iorio:
met Vitalik at a Bitcoin meetup, which he had organized in November 2012. Anthony was one of the first people that Vitalik asked to be a co-founder.
Anthony Di Iorio was not as keen as some of the other co-founders on the non-profit path that Ethereum adopted. And he largely took a backseat after this was decision was made.
Anthony went on to found Decentral. In May 2018 they launched Jaxx digital wallet.
Charles Hoskinson:
was introduced to Ethereum, and Buterin, by Anthony Di Iorio.
Charles was one of the original five Ethereum co-founders. He was named CEO in December 2013. He took a leading role in setting up the Swiss Foundation, and its legal framework. Charles was an early advocate of Ethereum as a pro-profit corporation.
He lead the development of Cardano in 2015 and launch in 2017. He was also a Ethereum Classic supporter in 2016.
Joseph Lubin:
graduated in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton in 1987. Joseph had experience in software engineering, music producing, business and finance. He was introduced to Vitalik by Anthony Di Iori.
Joseph was already working on a for-profit company to build the platform’s application layer when the decision to make Ethereum a nonprofit was made.
He was key in recruiting influential Ethereum partners, such as JPMorgan, CME Group, BNY Mellon, Credit Suisse, Banco Santander, BBVA, ING, UBS, BP, Intel, and Microsoft. Joseph went on to found Consensys.
Amir Chetrit:
at the time he met Vitalik, Amir was working with the Colored Coins, a project to manage real-world assets as tokens on top of the Bitcoin network.
At the co-founders’ meeting in June 2014, Amir was criticized by other Ethereum developers and co-founders for his lack of input on Ethereum. Subsequently he agreed to step down, while remaining a cofounder.
Note: Camila Russo wrote the story of Ethereum, “The Infinite Machine” or “How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum,” (books subtitle). In the process interviewed all the 8 co-founders.
Disclaimer: It may come across that we are Ethereum haters at times. We recently sold the majority of our ETH holdings only because it made economic sense. There are just better places to deploy our capital. We still hold enough to pay the gas for the foreseeable future.
The End
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