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

It seems that in line with this significant 10th anniversary, Ether is attempting to break the 4000 dollar mark again.

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

At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation has also completed an important "blood transfusion". Internally, changes are happening, and externally, changes are also taking place. Over the past year, a number of traditional financial background companies have gradually purchased ETH, and some institutions have announced the inclusion of ETH in their strategic asset reserves.

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

The past decade 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 "Eight Kings in Politics" to breaking out as an island under siege from "Ethereum killers"; from PoW to PoS, from technology labs to public infrastructure, Ethereum has completed its first cycle.

But its real story may have just begun.

The "Prequel" of Ethereum

The focus of this phase is the split and ideological conflict within the Ethereum founding team, which took place during the period of 2014-2015. Vitalik Buterin, the programmer genius who always speaks eloquently about technology, always answers "the matter of the 8 co-founders" when asked about his biggest regret in the Ethereum journey. Clearly, these 8 founders who had 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 form the leadership team, which consisted of the 5 founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit.

"This is obviously a very serious mistake, they look like good people, and they want to help, so at that time I thought, why not let them be in the 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 relevant entries on Wikipedia being constantly edited and modified. After Vitalik "personally certified 8 co-founders", the widely recognized version in 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 early formation of an 8-member core leadership group, resembling the "Eight Kings' Council" implemented in the early Yuan and Qing dynasties to prevent the emperor ( from acting arbitrarily.

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) Berlin "Pilgrimage"

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

That was the prehistoric era of Ethereum, when Bitcoin was only $204, more than a year after 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 headquarters in Switzerland and Berlin, the white paper was released, and Vitalik visited China to fundraise for Ethereum and meet miners.

Berlin is the city where he often stays.

"Pilgrimage," Vitalik described himself as being active in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin at that time. In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a few hundred meters, there are about a dozen shops that accept BTC payments. The community's central hub, the "Room 77" bar, is also a community center frequented by a diverse crowd including tech developers, political activists, and others.

Near this area, Ethereum rented an office, only 1.5 kilometers away from the "Room 77" restaurant, which Vitalik can reach in less than 20 minutes on foot. Now, if you search for the address of the Ethereum office "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps, you can still 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 Bitcoin conference in Miami in January 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.

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) Swiss Split

The year 2014 was not an ordinary one for the cryptocurrency world; the bankruptcy of an exchange due to a hack caused the price of Bitcoin to plummet severely, dropping from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a decline of 67%. It was also in this year that a trader sold his house in Shanghai and went all-in on Bitcoin at a price of $600, taking the position of CTO at a certain trading platform. SBF, who had just graduated from MIT, was applying for jobs on Wall Street.

For Ethereum, 2014 was an important year, staging a crypto version of "Silicon Valley's Eight Immortals Leave", and the split of this conference determined the future direction of Ethereum.

On June 7, 2014, all members of the leadership team of Ethereum attended an internal meeting in Switzerland, where the focus of the discussion was the future direction of Ethereum. The meeting was held at the Spaceship house in Switzerland. This is the origin of ETH and also the first headquarters of Ethereum.

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

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

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

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 consistently argued that Ethereum should become a commercial company, obtaining funding through venture capital and subsequently evolving into a profitable tech giant. "A horizontal power structure means that janitors and executives would be on the same level, which is just 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 consecutive years, known as the "Japanese Ethereum" due to its early focus on the Japanese market, and is also considered a first-generation "Ethereum killer," consistently ranking in the top ten of the cryptocurrency market by market capitalization.

Shortly after Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided to stop participating in core development and turned to founding the incubator ConsenSys, which completed a $450 million Series D funding round in 2022 with a valuation of $7 billion, with investors including some top VCs. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated a large number of blockchain startups and has built a series of rich ecosystem projects for Ethereum, the most successful of which is the wallet plugin MetaMask, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, generating weekly revenue of $300,000 and total revenue of nearly $300 million.

Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second-generation rich kid, and his reason for participating in Ethereum was to make more money. Therefore, after Ethereum established a non-profit operating model, Anthony gradually began to step back, being in a semi-retired state, created Decentral, developed the Jaxx digital wallet, and ultimately confirmed 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 billionaires in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that he decided to "cash out" and exit the space based on personal safety considerations, no longer funding any blockchain projects, and plans to focus on charity and other endeavors.

Amir Chetrit left due to a lack of investment in Ethereum, and at this conference in Switzerland, he was criticized by other developers and founders. He then turned 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 did not take into account the deep-seated differences among the members, the conflicts of ideas, and the clashes of interests, which turned out to be much more complex than he initially imagined. "I did realize at that time that people in the cryptocurrency space are not all like me, fighting for ideals; many people just want to make a lot of money. The relationships between people are a real issue."

The work must continue, and Vitalik and the others who remain 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.

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The Bumpy Foundation

July 30, 2015, is a historic moment for the launch of the Ethereum mainnet.

Some early members gathered in the Berlin office to witness the automatic launch of Ethereum after 1028201 blocks. A photograph of great historical significance captured some of the core members at that time. Those who were in the frame with Vitalik included several noteworthy core developers:

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; she is one of the main developers of the Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment for writing and deploying smart contracts, helping to simplify the smart contract development process.

At the same time, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it.