Ethereum Mainnet Launches 10th Anniversary: From "World Computer" to the Unfinished Path of Web3 Core

In 2025, Ethereum will celebrate the 10th anniversary of its Mainnet launch. From the birth of the Genesis Block on July 30, 2015, to becoming the world's second-largest blockchain network, Ethereum has not only pushed the boundaries of blockchain technology but has also profoundly influenced various fields such as finance, art, and governance. During these 10 years, it has pioneered the introduction of smart contracts, igniting waves of ICOs, Decentralized Finance, and NFTs, while also facing challenges such as scalability bottlenecks, high Gas fees, and security incidents. Intertwined with technological innovation and idealism, it has changed the world but has yet to reach its destination. This article will review the extraordinary 10 years of Ethereum from multiple perspectives, including technological evolution, ecological expansion, and key figures, and reflect on the ideals it has yet to achieve and its future direction.

1. The Path of Smart Contracts: A Decade of Technological Iteration and Ecological Expansion Trajectory

Ethereum was born out of dissatisfaction with the functional limitations of Bitcoin (BTC). After the mainnet went live in 2015, Ethereum quickly attracted global developers with its Turing-complete smart contracts platform, becoming the first true ecosystem in blockchain history capable of building complex applications. Although its technical architecture was initially rudimentary, it innovatively defined the operational paradigms of "smart contracts" and "decentralized applications (dApps)."

In 2017, the initial coin offering (ICO) boom on the Ethereum platform marked the first time its application capabilities attracted global attention from capital and developers. However, this phase also revealed Ethereum's limitations in scalability and security, such as contract vulnerabilities (like the DAO incident) and network congestion issues.

Subsequently, the Ethereum technology roadmap initiated iterations, introducing multiple hard fork upgrades such as Byzantium and Constantinople, continuously optimizing Gas pricing, security, and developer experience. The true technical transformation began with the launch of the "Ethereum 2.0" roadmap. The Merge completed in 2022 achieved a smooth transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), significantly reducing energy consumption while paving the way for subsequent sharding and data availability optimizations.

At the same time, to address the high transaction fees and congestion issues, Layer 2 scaling technologies are gradually maturing. Solutions such as Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup are being implemented, driving the emergence of ecosystems like Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync, forming a technological landscape where "the Ethereum main chain serves as the settlement layer, and Layer 2 supports user operations."

The evolution of these technologies has in turn continuously driven ecological prosperity. The rise of DeFi—represented by Uniswap's automated market-making mechanism, MakerDAO's decentralized stablecoin, and Aave's permissionless lending—has fundamentally changed the organization of financial services. Meanwhile, the explosion of NFTs has allowed Ethereum to truly reach the general public for the first time, greatly unleashing the expressive power of on-chain assets, from artworks to digital identities, and on to blockchain games.

Today, Ethereum not only has the most developers and the highest number of dApps, but it also constitutes the core infrastructure of Web3, supporting a diverse range of experiments from social, governance to data privacy.

2. The Unsung Heroes and Sparks of Thought: The Soul of Ethereum

The success of Ethereum is inseparable from the wisdom and perseverance of a group of key figures, among whom the most well-known is undoubtedly the founder Vitalik Buterin.

In the early days, Vitalik envisioned Ethereum not merely as a digital currency platform but as a "world computer" supporting Turing-complete smart contracts, allowing developers to freely build various decentralized applications (dApp) in a trustless environment. As the project progressed, Vitalik's philosophy also evolved continuously. He emphasized that "decentralization is not an absolute goal but a trade-off," pointing out that excessive decentralization might lead to inefficiency, while excessive centralization could bring security and trust risks. To this end, he supports a gradual implementation of scalability technologies, such as sharding and Layer 2 scaling solutions, aiming to enhance network throughput and user experience while ensuring decentralization.

In addition, Vitalik is very concerned about the upgradeability and governance mechanisms of the protocol, promoting Ethereum to achieve community consensus and iterative innovation through the EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) system. He is also actively involved in exploring cryptoeconomics and focuses on how incentive mechanisms affect network security and participant behavior. He proposed the vision of "Ethereum as a public infrastructure," hoping to construct a truly fair and censorship-resistant digital world through transparent, open, and permissionless protocol design.

In addition to Vitalik, Joseph Lubin, as a co-founder of the Ethereum Foundation and the founder of Consensys, is dedicated to promoting the industrialization and commercial implementation of the Ethereum ecosystem, helping blockchain technology move towards mainstream applications. The projects he promotes cover enterprise solutions, infrastructure development, and developer tool construction, greatly enriching the ecological layers of Ethereum.

Gavin Wood built the technological foundation of Ethereum in its early days, designed the EVM virtual machine, and proposed the concept of the Polkadot cross-chain ecosystem, promoting a future vision of multi-chain collaboration.

III. The Friction Between Unfulfilled Ideals and Reality: The Open Proposition of Ethereum

Despite Ethereum leading the revolution of blockchain technology and applications over the past decade, its grand vision as the "world computer" has yet to be fully realized. The core challenge remains the scalability dilemma: although Ethereum has transitioned from PoW to PoS and has promoted the widespread deployment of Layer 2 scaling solutions, the mainchain's capacity to process transactions per second is still limited, and scaling solutions like Rollup are still not mature enough in terms of user experience, fund security, and cross-chain communication, resulting in relatively high barriers to use.

Furthermore, a structural contradiction between decentralization and efficiency always exists. Ethereum is committed to building an open, self-organizing infrastructure, but in aspects such as network governance, node distribution, staking mechanisms, and development dominance, it continues to face criticism for centralization tendencies. For example, a large amount of staked ETH is concentrated in a few node operators, leading to a potential risk of "governance oligopoly."

In the transaction execution layer, Ethereum has also not completely escaped the "fairness" issue. The existence of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) means that miners or validators can profit by rearranging the order of transactions, harming the interests of ordinary users. This on-chain arbitrage mechanism is particularly severe in the Decentralized Finance ecosystem. Furthermore, in the face of global regulatory pressure, some node operators have begun to review certain transactions, raising concerns in the community about the ability of "censorship resistance."

Despite Ethereum's continuous advancement in its technical roadmap with sharding and data availability scaling, its complex ecological structure and high governance collaboration costs also present challenges from emerging chains: Solana attracts developers with high performance; Celestia focuses on modular architecture; EigenLayer explores new models for reusing Ethereum's trust mechanism.

Conclusion:

In 10 years, Ethereum has transformed from a white paper into the largest decentralized application platform in the world, changing the technological path of blockchain and reshaping the boundaries of digital finance, digital art, and digital governance. However, the ideals of Ethereum remain an unresolved proposition. Future competition will not only be a contest of computing power and throughput but also a comprehensive battle of ideas, communities, trust structures, and practical application capabilities. The story of Ethereum is not yet over, and hopefully, we will see a better future in the next 10 years.