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

It seems that in order to coincide with this important 10th anniversary, ETH is once again challenging the $4000 mark.

Since the mainnet launched on July 30, 2015, until today in 2025, over the past 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 repeated upgrades and consensus. Once underestimated, smart contracts have now become the most universal operating system in the Web3 world. ETH has also grown from a few dimes 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 "reshuffle". Changes are happening internally and externally. Over the past year, a number of traditional finance companies have gradually purchased ETH, with institutions such as SharpLink, BTCS, and BMNR announcing the inclusion of ETH in their strategic asset reserves.

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

This 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 "Eight Kings in Politics" founding team to the breakout of an island amidst the siege of the "Ethereum Killer"; from PoW to PoS, from a tech laboratory to public infrastructure, Ethereum has completed its first cycle.

But its real story may just be beginning.

The "Prequel" of Ethereum

The focus of this stage is the split of the Ethereum founding team and the ideological conflict, which took place during the period of 2014-2015. Vitalik Buterin, the programmer genius who always speaks passionately about technology, always answers that his biggest regret in the journey of Ethereum is "the matter of the 8 co-founders" when asked. Clearly, the departure of these 8 founders is a matter of concern for him.

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

"This is obviously a very serious wrong decision. They looked 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 online, and even related entries on Wikipedia are constantly being edited and modified. After Vitalik "personally certified 8 co-founders", the widely accepted version in the community is: in addition to 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 Princes' Governance" implemented during the early Yuan and Qing dynasties to prevent Emperor ( from acting arbitrarily.

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) Berlin "Pilgrimage"

In the documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story" released last year, Vitalik recalled that he started living as a digital nomad 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. While building Ethereum, he traveled around the world due to invitations from global communities. 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 long stayed.

"Pilgrimage", Vitalik described his time actively engaging in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin. In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a range of a few hundred meters, there are dozens of shops that accept BTC payments. The community hub "Room 77" is also a community center where a diverse group of people, including tech developers and political activists, frequently visit.

In this area, Ethereum rented an office, which is only 1.5 kilometers away from the "Room 77" restaurant, and Vitalik can reach it in less than 20 minutes on foot. Now, if you search for the Ethereum office address "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps, you can still 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 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; 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 not so ordinary for the crypto world. The theft and bankruptcy of Mt.Gox caused the price of Bitcoin to plummet severely, dropping from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a decline of up to 67%. It was also in this year that CZ sold his house in Shanghai and went all-in on Bitcoin at a price of $600, taking on the role of CTO at OKCoin. SBF, who had just graduated from MIT, was applying for jobs on Wall Street.

For Ethereum, 2014 was an important year, witnessing a cryptographic 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 gathered in Switzerland for an internal meeting, where the focus of the discussions was the future direction of Ethereum. The meeting took place at the Spaceship house in Switzerland, which is the origin of ETH and Ethereum's first headquarters.

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, "Is it about using venture capital money or crowdfunding from all ordinary people; is it about pursuing a profit model to become the Google of crypto, or a purely non-profit organization?" This became a recurring debate.

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

It is said that the meeting that 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 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 simply insane."

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 years, referred to as "Japan's Ethereum" due to its early focus on the Japanese market, and is also known as the first generation "Ethereum killer," consistently ranking in the top ten by market capitalization.

Following Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided to step away from 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. Investors included top VCs such as ParaFi Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund II, and Microsoft. 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 plugin wallet MetaMask, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, generating weekly revenues of $300,000 and total revenues nearing $300 million.

Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second-generation rich kid whose 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 and was in a semi-retired state, creating Decentral and developing 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 space. However, in 2021, he announced that he would "liquidate" and exit the space based on personal safety considerations, no longer funding any blockchain projects and intending to focus on charity and other ventures.

Amir Chetrit left due to a lack of investment in Ethereum, facing criticism from other developers and founders at the conference in Switzerland. He then ventured into 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 has 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 clashes of ideas, and the conflicts of interests, which were far more complicated than he initially imagined. "I did realize at that time that not everyone in the cryptocurrency space is 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 and the others who remained are continuing their efforts. 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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Stumbling Foundation

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

Some early members gathered in the office in Berlin to witness the automatic launch of Ethereum after block 1028201. A historically significant photo capturing some of the core members at that time. Those who appeared in the frame with Vitalik included several notable 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, as she is one of the main developers of the Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment used for writing and deploying smart contracts, which helps 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 was 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 the authors of ERC20 and ERC725, Fabian Vogelsteller, Vlad Zamfir, who promoted the transition of Ethereum from Proof of Work )PoW( to Proof of Stake, and Jutta Steiner, who is the head of security at the Ethereum Foundation, who later became part of the organization founded by Gavin.