Ethereum Turns 10: From Whitepaper to 2nd-Largest Blockchain on Vitalik Buterin’s 31st Birthday
On July 30, 2025, the blockchain and DeFi spheres celebrate a major milestone – it is 10 years since the launch of the Ethereum mainnet. Besides, this year, on January 31, Ethereum’s founder, the Canadian software engineer with Russian roots, turned 31.
This symbolic coincidence of important dates and milestones highlights not only a large period that has passed but also the maturity of Ethereum, which has made a tremendous impact on the digital finance landscape and largely reshaped it. While Ethereum started as an ambitious idea conceived by a teenage cryptographer, it has become a powerhouse from which thousands of dapps, cryptocurrencies, and new blockchains have sprung and continue to do so. The long and significant journey of Ethereum, from its inception in a whitepaper to becoming a global infrastructure, has been truly revolutionary. Especially now that in 2024, the SEC approved spot Ethereum ETFs, following the approval of similar Bitcoin-based products.
The creation of Ethereum – the first ICO in history
Vitalik Buterin first came up with the idea of Ethereum at the end of 2013, when he published a whitepaper that described a decentralized blockchain platform able to execute smart contracts. This was the time, when Bitcoin had already existed for four years. BTC pioneered the idea of decentralized money; however, it lacked flexibility and scalability.
Vitalik wanted to make Ethereum, not just money, but rather a large, general-purpose platform. He envisioned it as a future “world computer”, which would serve as a base layer for any type of decentralized applications (dapps). After the whitepaper was published, it gained the attention of other prominent developers – Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and others. Thanks to their mutual efforts, Ethereum quickly moved from being just an idea to the development stage, resulting in a great public crowdfunding campaign on the Internet – the Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Hoskinson later went on to found Cardano. Back then, even Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the future co-founder of Binance. was spotted in Vitalik Buterin’s company.
In mid-2014, Vitalik and his team held the earliest and most legendary ICOs. They raised 31,000 Bitcoins, worth around $18 million at the time. Those funds were raised by selling Ether (ETH), Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency. This was not only the campaign that secured enough funds to develop the Ethereum blockchain, but also became a typical fundraising method for all blockchain projects that emerged after Ethereum in the years to come. A wave of token offerings followed quite soon, thus fundamentally transforming startup financing methods. Ethereum used the raised BTC to create the Ethereum Foundation based in Switzerland. This non-profit organization was in charge of developing the initial Ethereum protocol.
Ethereum goes live, growing into DeFi and dapp powerhouse
On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum network went live as the “Frontier” release was rolled out by the team. It provided the groundwork for Ethereum’s further development and adoption. In the years that followed, Ethereum experienced several upgrades: “Homestead” in 2016, “Metropolis” (consisting of Byzantium and Constantinople, both occurring in 2019), and, finally, the long-anticipated transition to Ethereum 2.0 took place.
In 2017, various blockchain platforms, research groups, and several large companies joined forces to create the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) with 30 founding members. Those included ConsenSys, CME Group, Toyota Research Institute, Samsung SDS, Microsoft, JP Morgan, etc.
Since then, Ethereum has grown in popularity and in terms of functionality, attracting developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. Smart contracts allowed developers to launch ICOs, stablecoins, decentralized exchanges, games, NFTs, and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). Thus, Ethereum became a launchpad for the gradual creation of Web3.
Ethereum is the Web3 launchpad
By the end of 2020, Ethereum strengthened its position as the second-biggest blockchain after Bitcoin. While BTC was mostly used as a store of value and sometimes also a means of payment, Ethereum functioned as an operating system for the decentralized Internet. Thanks to Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard, many new tokens on Ethereum-based new platforms were created, including such top currencies as Tron, BNB, etc, which later moved along with their platforms to their native mainnets from Ethereum. 2017 was the year of the ICO boom, seeing many of those new blockchains emerge in the crypto space.
By 2020, decentralized finance (DeFi) emerged on Ethereum, turning this blockchain into a DeFi operating system with such protocols as Uniswap, Compound, Maker DAO, etc, letting users trade, borrow, and earn interest without any intermediaries. A boom of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) followed at about the same time on Ethereum, too.
Thus, Ethereum became not just a platform for developers, but it also began accommodating artists, gamers, and even musicians who launched entire albums as NFTs, which traded on NFT marketplaces, such as OpenSea. Now that Vitalik Buterin has turned 31, his brainchild, Ethereum, is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary with plans for further development and new updates to be implemented to make the platform even more functional and popular in helping the world transition to Web3 and make the decentralized Internet available for everyone.
