In 2025, Ethereum (ETH) will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its mainnet launch. From the birth of the genesis block on July 30, 2015, to becoming the world's second-largest blockchain network, Ethereum has not only pushed the boundaries of blockchain technology but has also profoundly impacted various fields such as finance, art, and governance. Over the past decade, it has pioneered the introduction of smart contracts, igniting waves of ICOs, DeFi, and NFTs, while also facing challenges such as scalability bottlenecks, high gas fees, and security incidents.
This article will review the extraordinary ten years of Ethereum from multiple dimensions, including technological evolution, ecological expansion, and key figures, while contemplating its unfulfilled ideals and future direction.
The Path of Smart Contracts: A Decade of Technological Iteration and Ecological Expansion
Ethereum was born out of dissatisfaction with the functional limitations of Bitcoin (BTC). After the mainnet launch in 2015, Ethereum quickly attracted global developers with its Turing-complete smart contract platform, becoming the first truly complex application ecosystem in blockchain history. Although its technical architecture was initially rudimentary, it innovatively defined the operational paradigms of "smart contracts" and "decentralized applications (dApps)."
In 2017, the initial coin offering (ICO) boom on the Ethereum platform marked the first time its application capabilities garnered global attention from capital and developers. However, this phase also exposed Ethereum's limitations in scalability and security, such as contract vulnerabilities (like the DAO incident) and network congestion issues.
Subsequently, Ethereum's technical roadmap began to iterate, introducing multiple hard fork upgrades such as Byzantium and Constantinople, continuously optimizing gas fees, security, and developer experience. The true technological transformation began with the launch of the "Ethereum 2.0" roadmap. The Merge completed in 2022 achieved a smooth transition from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS), significantly reducing energy consumption while paving the way for subsequent sharding and data availability optimizations.
At the same time, to address the high transaction fees and congestion issues, Layer 2 scaling technologies gradually matured. Solutions like Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup were progressively implemented, driving the rise of ecosystems such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync, forming a technical landscape where "the Ethereum main chain serves as the settlement layer, and Layer 2 handles user operations."
These technological evolutions have continuously propelled ecological prosperity. The rise of DeFi—represented by Uniswap's automated market-making mechanism, MakerDAO's decentralized stablecoin, and Aave's permissionless lending—has fundamentally changed the organization of financial services. The explosion of NFTs has allowed Ethereum to truly reach the general public for the first time, greatly unleashing the expressive power of on-chain assets, from artworks to digital identities and on-chain games.
Today, Ethereum not only has the most developers and dApps but also constitutes the core infrastructure of Web3, supporting diverse experiments ranging from social networking and governance to data privacy.
Behind-the-Scenes Heroes and Sparks of Thought: The Soul of Ethereum
The success of Ethereum is inseparable from the wisdom and perseverance of a group of key figures, among whom the most well-known is undoubtedly its founder, Vitalik Buterin.
In the early days, Vitalik envisioned Ethereum not just as a digital currency platform but as a "world computer" supporting Turing-complete smart contracts, allowing developers to freely build various decentralized applications (dApps) in a trustless environment. As the project progressed, Vitalik's philosophy also evolved. He emphasized that "decentralization is not an absolute goal but a trade-off," pointing out that excessive decentralization could lead to inefficiency, while excessive centralization could bring security and trust risks. To this end, he supported a gradual realization of scalable technical routes, such as sharding and Layer 2 scaling solutions, aiming to enhance network throughput and user experience while ensuring decentralization.
Additionally, Vitalik is very concerned about the protocol's upgradability and governance mechanisms, promoting Ethereum to achieve community consensus and iterative innovation through the EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) system. He also actively participates in the exploration of cryptoeconomics, focusing on how incentive mechanisms affect network security and participant behavior. He proposed the vision of "Ethereum as public infrastructure," hoping to build a truly fair and censorship-resistant digital world through transparent, open, and permissionless protocol design.
Besides Vitalik, Joseph Lubin, as a co-founder of the Ethereum Foundation and the founder of Consensys, is dedicated to promoting the industrialization and commercial implementation of the Ethereum ecosystem, helping blockchain technology move towards mainstream applications. The projects he promotes cover enterprise solutions, infrastructure development, and developer tool construction, greatly enriching the ecological layers of Ethereum.
Gavin Wood, on the other hand, built the technical foundation of Ethereum in its early days, designing the EVM virtual machine and proposing the concept of the Polkadot cross-chain ecosystem, promoting a future vision of multi-chain collaboration.
Although Ethereum has led a revolution in blockchain technology and applications over the past decade, its grand vision of a "world computer" has yet to be fully realized. The core challenge remains the scalability dilemma: despite Ethereum's transition from PoW to PoS and the widespread deployment of Layer 2 scaling solutions, the main chain still processes a limited number of transactions per second, and solutions like Rollup are still not mature enough in terms of user experience, fund security, and cross-chain communication, with relatively high barriers to entry.
Moreover, the structural contradiction between decentralization and efficiency persists. Ethereum aims to build an open, self-organizing infrastructure, but it continues to face criticism for centralization tendencies in areas such as network governance, node distribution, staking mechanisms, and development dominance. For example, a large amount of staked ETH is concentrated among a few node operators, creating potential risks of "governance oligopoly."
At the transaction execution layer, Ethereum has also not completely escaped the issue of "fairness." The existence of maximum extractable value (MEV) means that miners or validators can profit by reordering transactions, harming the interests of ordinary users, and this on-chain arbitrage mechanism is particularly severe in the DeFi ecosystem. Additionally, in the face of global regulatory pressure, some node operators have begun to scrutinize certain transactions, raising community concerns about "censorship resistance."
Despite Ethereum's continuous advancement in its technical roadmap regarding sharding and data availability expansion, its complex ecological structure and high governance collaboration costs also expose it to challenges from emerging chains: Solana attracts developers with high performance; Celestia focuses on modular architecture; EigenLayer explores new models for reusing Ethereum's trust mechanism.
Over the past decade, Ethereum has evolved from a white paper to building the world's largest decentralized application platform, changing the technological path of blockchain and reshaping the boundaries of digital finance, digital art, and digital governance. However, Ethereum's ideals remain an unfinished proposition. Future competition will not only be a contest of computing power and throughput but also a comprehensive battle of ideas, communities, trust structures, and the ability to implement practical applications.
The story of Ethereum is far from over.
Related: Ethereum (ETH) price aims for the $4000 mark: Will this time be different?
Original: “Ten Years of Ethereum: Ideals, Reality, and the Unfinished Road”
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