The Milestones of Ethereum Through Six Years
July 30 marked the 6th anniversary of Ethereum, the largest altcoin by market capitalization.
Despite its success on the crypto market and pleasant forecasts from experts, Ethereum developers never stop improving. For instance, the Ethereum (ETH) 2.0 update is coming up in 2022. Besides, the London hardfork update is scheduled for August 5th, 1 PM (GMT+1). This is going to change Ethereum’s history for good and, perhaps, aggravate the war against Bitcoin.
As reported by media outlets, the EIP-1559 update was initially proposed to reform the transaction fees market. Also, it was aimed to be a game-changer for Ethereum miners.
Regardless, you might’ve done some thinking about what has led Ethereum to overwhelming success? Let’s dive in and recall some bullet points in the history of cryptocurrency with Altynex!
How was Ethereum created?
The first-ever mention of Ethereum made an appearance in 2013. It was founded and developed by Vitalik Buterin, a Canadian programmer of Russian origin. At that time, he just turned 20 years old.
In the following video, he briefly explains the idea of creating Ethereum.
Nowadays, Ethereum is considered a valuable alternative or a complement to Bitcoin, which made a worldwide appearance in 2009. Ethereum is the second-largest crypto, which constitutes the 18% share of all transactions in the crypto space. We’re not going to argue — this is a tremendous achievement for any digital asset, as well as for the young programmer Buterin.
Generally speaking, he noticed some shortcomings in the blockchain created by Bitcoin and managed to tackle the issue by introducing a new cryptocurrency — Ethereum.
The WisdomTree analyst Jianing Wu recalls Buterin’s pilot steps:
“At first, he wanted to achieve this by adding a more advanced scripting language on top of Bitcoin to allow smart contracts processing, but this idea was rejected by the Bitcoin community. Then, Buterin decided to create a completely new blockchain to enable this ‘world computer’.”
Thus, Ethereum became a crypto-phenomenon, famous for its decentralized (DeFi) systems and smart contracts.
In this video, Vitalik Buterin explains decentralization at the TechCrunch conference in 2017.
By the dawn of 2014, Ethereum had completed the first round of financing. The crypto with great potential collected $18 million as a result of Ether tokens sales. As of today, Ethereum’s market capitalization reached almost $213 billion.
Ethereum Enters the Crypto Market
As the analyst Wu notes, the cryptocurrency’s ascent occurred in stages, involving hard forks and planned and unplanned upgrades, with one of the most significant starting in mid-2015 and lasting until March 2016.
Furthermore, she continues:
“On July 30, 2015, the first version of Ethereum (Ethereum 1.0) was released, called Frontier. It had the two most basic functions: to enable users to mine ether and run smart contracts. The purpose of the initial stage was to get the network started, so miners could set up their mining processes and developers could test their decentralized applications (DApps).”
Today, the cryptocurrency is in a stagnation stage of development, also called Ethereum 2.0. The initial goal is to increase the transactional capabilities of the digital asset. Currently, developers experience issues with the traffic in the Ether network, which can limit the volume of transactions and waste a significant amount of energy. As a consequence, Ethereum mining is being broadly criticized. Hence, Ethereum 2.0 is here to fill in these gaps.
Thereby, Jianing Wu concludes:
“Two of the major upgrades are the shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and the implementation of shard chains which will spread the workload of the network,” adds Wu. “Ethereum 2.0 is envisioned to be more scalable, secure and sustainable, although when (or if) it will ultimately be implemented, and other fallout issues, remain unclear.”
According to the latest news, in early 2022, the blockchain will upgrade to Ethereum 2.0, a faster and more efficient model. These upgrades are required to keep up with the rising demands and expectations of the network’s success. The proof-of-stake ETH 2.0 network promises to be a simple evolution of the blockchain. Also, it will consolidate Ethereum’s history without erasing it.
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