Ethereum Mainnet 10th Anniversary: The Evolution from the Founding Team to a Decentralized Community

On July 30, 2025, Ethereum will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its Mainnet launch. As a representative project of blockchain technology, Ethereum has not only changed the cryptocurrency landscape but also provided a powerful infrastructure for Decentralization applications. The price of ETH is also attempting to break through the four-year resistance level since 2021, aiming for $4000 at this important moment. On that day, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and several core contributors will give speeches during the tenth anniversary celebration live broadcast.

Looking back on the ten-year development of Ethereum, from the founding team to the rise of the decentralized community, there is a group of idealistic and talented key figures behind it. Their coming together and parting not only shaped the present of Ethereum but also influenced the future of the entire blockchain industry.

The Starting Point of Ethereum

In 2013, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin proposed the idea of creating a Turing-complete blockchain platform to support the development of decentralized applications. This idea attracted Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit to join, forming the initial team of the Ethereum project. Soon after, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke also joined, forming the "Genesis Eight". However, differences in ideology and goals among the team ultimately led to the later split.

Vitalik Buterin

As the founder and spiritual leader of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin's life trajectory is closely tied to the crypto world. At the age of 6, he immigrated to Canada with his family and early on demonstrated exceptional talent in mathematics, programming, and economics. At 17, he learned about Bitcoin from his father, who was a computer scientist. In 2011, to earn Bitcoin, he began writing for blogs, and through this, he met Mihai Alisie, with whom he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine.

In 2013, after visiting multiple cryptocurrency projects around the world, he believed that Bitcoin's functionality was too limited, and thus published the Ethereum white paper, proposing the concept of a Turing-complete blockchain platform. In 2014, he received the Thiel Fellowship, and subsequently dropped out of the University of Waterloo to devote himself full-time to the development of Ethereum.

As the helm of Ethereum, Vitalik continues to lead the evolution of the technical roadmap. On September 15, 2022, Ethereum successfully completed "The Merge," transitioning from the PoW consensus mechanism to PoS, reducing energy consumption by 99%. On April 12, 2023, the Shapella upgrade was completed, allowing stakers to withdraw their ETH for the first time. On June 9 of the same year, he published a blog post titled "The Three Transitions," proposing three major transitions that Ethereum must undergo for future maturity.

Recently, Vitalik's thoughts have become increasingly profound. In June 2025, he stated at the ETHGlobal Prague conference that Ethereum L1 would achieve approximately 10 times scalability within a year. On July 2, at the EthCC conference in France, he warned again that if decentralization only remains a slogan, Ethereum will face an existential crisis, and he proposed three core standards to test decentralization.

In addition to his technical contributions, Vitalik is also actively involved in philanthropy, donating billions of dollars worth of crypto assets to various organizations. At the same time, he is deeply concerned about the potential risks of AI, believing that superintelligent AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, and advocates for a technology development philosophy of "d/acc" that focuses on defense, decentralization, and democracy.

Charles Hoskinson

Charles Hoskinson served as the CEO of Ethereum; he studied mathematics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder in his early years, and founded the "Bitcoin Education Project" in 2013.

At the end of 2013, he co-founded Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin and others. However, he and Vitalik had fundamental disagreements on the direction of the project's development. Hoskinson advocated for Ethereum to establish a commercial company and bring in venture capital, while Vitalik insisted on a non-profit and decentralized approach. This clash of ideas ultimately led to Hoskinson being "removed" from the team in 2014, leaving in anger.

After leaving Ethereum, Hoskinson did not fall into despair. At the end of 2014, he co-founded the blockchain engineering and research company IOHK with former Ethereum colleague Jeremy Wood. IOHK's flagship project is the public chain platform Cardano, which stands out in the industry due to its rigorous academic research style and peer review mechanism, being hailed as "Japan's Ethereum" or the first generation "Ethereum killer," and it still holds a place among the top ten by market capitalization.

In recent years, Hoskinson has remained active at the forefront of the industry and often makes bold predictions. He recently stated that the price of Bitcoin could increase tenfold to one million dollars, while he believes that Cardano has even greater growth potential, possibly rising by a hundredfold or even a thousandfold.

In addition to his achievements in the cryptocurrency field, Hoskinson is also involved in philanthropy and politics. In 2021, he donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University to establish the Center for Formal Mathematics and funded a deep-sea exploration project led by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. He also announced the establishment of a political action committee named "Wyoming Integrity" in February 2025.

Anthony Di Iorio

As a wealthy second-generation rich kid and angel investor, Anthony Di Iorio is one of the key figures who funded the launch of Ethereum. He learned about Bitcoin through podcasts in 2012 and quickly got involved. In the same year, he organized a Bitcoin meetup in Toronto, where he met Vitalik Buterin and together they promoted the release of the Ethereum white paper.

Di Iorio's initial intention to participate in Ethereum was to make money. Therefore, when the team ultimately decided in 2014 that Ethereum would operate on a non-profit model, he became disheartened and gradually faded out of the core circle thereafter.

After leaving Ethereum, Di Iorio's business ambitions did not stop expanding. In 2014, he founded the blockchain company Decentral in Toronto and launched the city's first two-way Bitcoin ATM, promoting the local application of cryptocurrency. In 2016, he created the popular multi-currency wallet Jaxx Liberty. That same year, he was hired as the first Chief Digital Officer by the Toronto Stock Exchange, but soon left to focus on his own projects.

Although he stated in 2021 that he would no longer venture into the cryptocurrency space for personal safety reasons, it seems he hasn't completely stepped back; he launched the Andiami project in 2022, aimed at addressing centralization issues in decentralized networks through hardware, token economics, and game theory.

At the Consensus 2025 conference, he stated that the original intention of Ethereum was not to compete with Bitcoin, but to serve as an alternative, and he believes that Ethereum, due to its wide range of application scenarios, has the potential to surpass Bitcoin in market capitalization.

Amir Chetrit

Amir Chetrit is the most low-key and mysterious of the eight co-founders of Ethereum. He is a computer science enthusiast with dual nationality in the United States and Israel, and he previously worked in the real estate industry.

In 2013, Chetrit met Vitalik Buterin at a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam and was invited to join the Ethereum project. At that time, he was involved in an Israeli startup called "Colored Coins," which aimed to manage real-world assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.

However, at the Swiss conference in June 2014 that decided the fate of Ethereum, Chetrit was questioned by other developers and co-founders due to his limited contributions to the project, and ultimately agreed to step down from the core team while still retaining his title as co-founder.

Since then, Amir Chetrit has rarely appeared in the public eye. According to insiders, Chetrit is currently supporting multiple blockchain projects discreetly, but he seldom makes public appearances and prefers not to promote himself.

Gavin Wood

As the first CTO of Ethereum, Gavin Wood is a key figure in turning Vitalik Buterin's grand blueprint into real code. He possesses strong engineering implementation skills and is known as the "invisible brain" of Ethereum.

In 2013, Gavin Wood met with Vitalik and others to embark on the journey of Ethereum. He wrote the "Yellow Paper" that defines the technical specifications of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and he also led the development of the smart contract programming language Solidity, laying a solid technical foundation for the entire Ethereum ecosystem. It can be said that without Gavin Wood, the realization of Ethereum would be out of the question.

However, just three months after the launch of the Ethereum Mainnet in 2015, Gavin Wood chose to leave. He had significant disagreements with Vitalik regarding the engineering management model; he believed the project needed more efficient centralized management to advance, while Vitalik insisted on the decentralization of the community-driven model.

After leaving, Gavin Wood founded Parity Technologies in 2016. Subsequently, he established the Web3 Foundation and created Polkadot------a cross-chain network aimed at connecting different blockchains. In October 2022, he stepped down as CEO of Parity to become Chief Architect, focusing more on technological innovation. In April 2024, he released a gray paper on the next-generation architecture of Polkadot called JAM. In June of this year, Gavin Wood stated in a forum post that he personally has no intention of issuing new tokens based on the JAM protocol, and he does not believe that Parity or the Web3 Foundation should do so.

Joseph Lubin

Joseph Lubin, a Canadian-American entrepreneur with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, is the most commercially experienced among the eight co-founders of Ethereum. Before joining Ethereum, he worked at financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs.

After Ethereum established a non-profit model in 2014, Lubin also chose to no longer participate in core development. However, his departure was not a break, but rather a deeper involvement and construction of the Ethereum ecosystem in another way. In 2015, he founded ConsenSys, a software technology company and incubator focused on the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the past decade, ConsenSys has become the most important and prolific building force in the Ethereum ecosystem. It has incubated numerous blockchain startups and contributed countless key infrastructures and applications to Ethereum, among which the most successful are the wallet MetaMask, with hundreds of millions of users, and the developer tools Infura and Truffle.

Recently, the movements of Lubin and ConsenSys have drawn much attention. On May 27th, ConsenSys led a private funding round of approximately $425 million for a certain company, with Lubin serving as its chairman of the board. The company will acquire ETH as its main reserve asset. In addition, in response to the community's questions about why MetaMask has not issued a token, Lubin hinted multiple times in June 2025 that several products from ConsenSys will launch tokens in the future and reward users.