The tenth anniversary of Ethereum has begun to step into Wall Street

It seems that in order to celebrate this important 10th anniversary, Ether is once again making a push for the $4000 mark.

Since the mainnet went live on July 30, 2015, until today in 2025, over these 10 years, it has not only witnessed the ups and downs of the entire blockchain industry but has also created an unprecedented "world computer" through numerous upgrades and consensus. Smart contracts, which were once not highly regarded, have now become the most universal operating system in the Web3 world. ETH has also grown 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 exchange". Internally, changes are happening, and externally, changes are also taking place. Over the past year, a number of traditional financial companies have successively purchased ETH, with institutions such as SharpLink, BTCS, and BMNR announcing that they will include ETH in their strategic asset reserves.

All these changes occurred in this special year: 2025, marking ten years since the launch of the Ethereum mainnet.

In the past decade, a remarkable chapter in the history of blockchain has been written. From a white paper to a global ecosystem worth hundreds of billions of dollars; from the founding team of "the Eight Kings in Power" to breaking through as an isolated island amidst the siege of "Ethereum killers"; from PoW to PoS, from a technical laboratory to public infrastructure, Ethereum has completed its first cycle.

But its real story may have just begun.

Ethereum's "Prequel"

The focus of this stage is the split and ideological conflict among the founding team of Ethereum, during the period from 2014 to 2015. Vitalik Buterin, the programmer genius who always speaks endlessly about technology, always responds when asked what his biggest regret in the journey of Ethereum is with "the matter of the 8 co-founders." Clearly, these 8 founders who have long since departed are a knot in his heart.

When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first 10 developers who responded and selected 5 of them for the leadership team, which are the 5 founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit.

"This is clearly a very serious error in judgment. They seemed like good people, and they wanted to help, so at the time I thought, why not let them be in leadership?" Vitalik said while reflecting on his decision at that time.

Regarding the co-founders of Ethereum, this is a controversial topic with many versions available online, even the relevant entries on Wikipedia are constantly being edited and modified. After Vitalik "certified 8 co-founders in person", the widely recognized version in the community is: after the 5 original founders, three more 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, very similar to the "Eight Kings' Council" implemented in the early Yuan Dynasty to prevent the emperor ( from acting arbitrarily.

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) Berlin "Pilgrimage"

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

That was the prehistoric period of Ethereum, when Bitcoin was only $204, more than a year after Vitalik and Mihai Alisie founded Bitcoin Magazine. During the construction of Ethereum, due to invitations from communities around the world, he traveled all over the globe. In 2013 and 2014, Ethereum established headquarters in Switzerland and Berlin, the white paper was released, Vitalik visited China to raise funds for Ethereum, and met with miners.

Berlin is the city where he has stayed for a long time.

"Pilgrimage", Vitalik described his active time in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin. In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a few hundred meters, there are over a dozen stores that accept BTC payments. The community hub "Room 77" is also a central spot where a diverse crowd, including tech developers and political activists, often frequents.

In this area, Ethereum rented an office just 1.5 kilometers away from the "Room 77" restaurant, which Vitalik can reach in less than 20 minutes on foot. Now, searching for the address of the Ethereum office "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps, you can see that this address is marked with Ethereum Network Launch ###30/07/2015(, along with 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 by Vitalik's side, 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 effect was good; Ethereum officially entered the public eye. However, this was also the eve of separation.

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) Swiss Split

The entire year of 2014 was extraordinary for the cryptocurrency circle. The theft and bankruptcy of Mt. Gox caused a serious decline in Bitcoin prices, dropping from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a decrease of 67%. It was also in this year that CZ sold his house in Shanghai and gambled on Bitcoin at a price of $600 to become the CTO of OK. SBF, who had just graduated from MIT, was sending resumes on Wall Street.

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

On June 7, 2014, all the leadership members 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, which is the origin of ETH and also the first headquarters of Ethereum.

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

Vitalik recalled this memory, saying: "I was once persuaded to lean towards making Ethereum more enterprise-oriented. But this has never made me feel more comfortable, and it even made me feel a bit dirty."

It is said that this meeting, which determined the "life and death" of Ethereum, lasted an entire day, and Vitalik's decision was to choose a 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 out some people."

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 obvious opponent in this conflict. He has always argued that Ethereum should become a commercial company, obtaining funding through venture capital and then developing 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 restructured into a venture capital studio(, and launched a PoS public chain called Cardano. It has been a leading altcoin for many years, often referred to as the "Japanese Ethereum" due to its early focus on the Japanese market, and is also known as the first generation "Ethereum killer," consistently ranking among the top ten in market capitalization.

After Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided to step away from core development and focused on establishing the incubator ConsenSys, which completed a $450 million Series D financing round in 2022 at a valuation of $7 billion, with investors including ParaFi Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund II, Microsoft, and other top VCs. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated a large number of blockchain startups and built a series of rich ecosystem projects for Ethereum, the most successful of which is the plug-in wallet MetaMask, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, generating weekly revenue of $300,000 and total revenue nearing $300 million.

Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second-generation rich kid, and his involvement in Ethereum is primarily to make more money. Therefore, after Ethereum established a non-profit operational model, Anthony gradually began to step back, entering a semi-retirement state, created Decentral, and developed the Jaxx digital wallet, ) ultimately confirming 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 wealthiest individuals in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that based on personal safety considerations, he decided to "liquidate" and exit the industry, no longer funding any blockchain projects, and plans to focus on charity and other ventures.

Amir Chetrit left due to a lack of investment in Ethereum and was criticized by other developers and founders at the conference in Switzerland. He then turned to other industries, and because he has always been 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 consider the deep-seated differences among members, the conflicts of ideology, and the clashes of interests, which were far more complex than he initially envisioned. "I did realize at that time that people in the cryptocurrency field are not all striving for ideals like I am; many people just want to make a lot of money. The relationships between people are a real issue."

The work must continue, and Vitalik along with others will carry on. 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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Bumpy Foundation

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

Some early members gathered in the Berlin office to witness the automatic launch of Ethereum after block 1028201. A historically significant photo captured some of the core members at that time. Those in the frame with Vitalik included several noteworthy core developers:

Gustav Simonsson was an early security advisor for Ethereum and played a crucial role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity and continued to deepen his work in 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, as she is one of the main developers of Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment used for writing and deploying smart contracts, helping to simplify the development process of smart contracts.

Meanwhile, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it and one of the initiators of The DAO. Although it forked in 2016 due to a security vulnerability, The DAO remains one of the most important experiments in blockchain history, driving the exploration of decentralized governance models.

In addition, there are ERC 20 and ERC 725 author Fabian Vogelsteller, who promoted the transition of Ethereum from Proof of Work )PoW( to Proof of Stake, Vlad Zamfir, and Jutta Steiner, who is the security lead of the Ethereum Foundation and later became the CEO of Parity Technologies founded by Gavin ).

At the same time, there is a person in this photo who is always talked about.