High Reconstruction Special Article | Ten Years of Ether, A Century of Humanity: The Tenth Anniversary of Ethereum Genesis

As Ethereum celebrates its 10th anniversary, let's take a look back at the key moments and transitions Ethereum has gone through in the past decade. (Synopsis: Gao Reconstruction Article" I predicted He Jinli won the election at Polymarket and lost two dollars) (Background supplement: Interview" Gao Reconstruction, Zhang Baocheng, Jian Xinchang: How blockchain promotes digital democracy and eliminates obstacles to development) In 2015, the Hong Kong film "Ten Years" was released, and five young new directors used five short stories to depict Hong Kong in their imagination ten years later, that is, in 2025. "Ten Years", with a budget of only an exaggerated HK$500,000, has been released on a small scale to resonate, awakening the anxiety and fear buried in the hearts of Hong Kong people, and winning the Academy Award for Best Film, which has widely reverberated. At that time, everyone thought that the film used exaggerated expressions, and ten years later, I learned that many of the bridges in the original movie were far less absurd than reality. Short-term vs long-term effects Also in 2015, a decade later, there were unexpected developments, as well as broader and more far-reaching Ethereum. On July 30, 2015, Ethereum minted the genesis block, gradually bringing irreversible changes at various levels such as finance, content, and collaboration at a seemingly slow and fast pace. The famous Amara's Law states that we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of a technology while underestimating its long-term effects. In the eyes of many people, the development of Ethereum is very slow, obviously more than ten years ago there was the vision of the world computer, seven or eight years ago thought that web3 was coming, the result is a Cryptokitties game, this "world computer" stuck to death, plus the coin market turned bear, many people are disappointed with Ethereum or even all blockchain-related technologies, and then leave. When the public's thoughts and energy are turned to AI, VR and other fields, there are groups of people who have never given up, deep plowing, accumulation, to everyone to forget web3, the accumulation of small improvements gradually make the blockchain practical, such as USDT and other applications quietly outside the mainstream media field of vision deeply rooted, in recent months the blessing of the US government, is just to add fuel to the fire that has been lit, all of a sudden, the world suddenly found that the past far underestimated Bitcoin, The impact of Ethereum and stablecoins (most of which are issued on Ethereum). In the most difficult and questioning moments, it has never slowed down the pace of development, did not adjust the development blueprint for short-term currency prices, did not take shortcuts to get closer to powerful countries and compromised decentralization, and always adhered to long-termism, the first to recommend Ethereum. A brief history of Ethereum, step by step To understand the history of Ethereum, I am afraid to look at hundreds of web pages. In the following, I divide the history of Ethereum since its conception into four stages: beginning, inheritance, transformation, and integration, and then list the most important one to several major events every year to help readers quickly review how Ethereum has developed step by step to get to where it is today. From: White Paper, Fundraising, Genesis 2013 Vitalik Buterin wrote the Ethereum white paper on Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform. 2014 Ethereum crowdfunding successfully raised 31,529 BTC, which at that time had a market capitalization of about 18 million magnesium and sold 60,102,216 ETH. On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum mainnet was launched and the genesis block was minted. In 2016, the Ethereum-based project The DAO had a vulnerability, 3.6 million ETH was stolen, with a market value of about 50 million magnesium, and finally the community processed it with a hard fork, and the current Ethereum is the fork to add code to retrieve the stolen assets, and the original chain that insists on "code is law" and accepts the fact of theft has become today's Ethereum Classic (ETC). ICO, Winter, DeFi 2017 NFT standard (ERC-721) appeared, Cryptokitties launched; The ICO boom has spawned numerous Ethereum-based projects; Byzantium has been upgraded and the mining reward has been adjusted from 5 ETH to 3 ETH. The bursting of the 2018 ICO bubble and the four-year cyclical effect of Bitcoin caused the ETH coin price to fall from a high of 1,448 magnesium at the beginning of the year to a low of 84 magnesium at the end of the year, a range of more than ninety percent, coupled with the delay of the Constantinople upgrade due to technical problems, Ethereum entered a trough. At the beginning of 2019, Constantinople and St. Petersburg were upgraded, mining incentives were further reduced to 2 ETH, and Istanbul was upgraded at the end of the year, laying the foundation for future L2 and zero-knowledge proofs; DeFi applications such as Uniswap, Compound, and MakerDAO are beginning to emerge; ETH coin prices bottomed out. 2020 Compound, Uniswap, Aave, Curve, etc. have launched liquidity mining, triggering DeFi Summer, the world's first glimpse of the power of distributed finance, while highlighting the problems of low Ethereum throughput and high fees, L2 expansion is imminent; At the end of the year, the beacon chain is online, and staking begins, taking the first step out of PoS. Turn: NFT, PoS, L2 2021 Berlin, London, Altair upgrades, including London's EIP-1559, successfully coordinated the opposition and protest of miners, destroyed the basic part of the transaction fee, reduced the supply of ETH, and generated the possibility of deflation; Arbitrum and Optimism L2 mainnets launched; Avatar NFT projects such as BAYC have sparked hot speculation, pushing the ETH coin price to an all-time high of 4,878 mg. 2022 The Merge upgraded, officially terminated Proof of Work (PoW) mining, and entered a new stage of Proof of Stake (PoS), reducing energy consumption by more than 99%; Technological breakthroughs were accompanied by a cold winter of currency prices, the collapse of Terra, the collapse of FTX, and another four-year cycle of Bitcoin, which once caused ETH to fall below 1,000 magnesium. 2023 Shapella upgrade, open ETH staking withdrawal, officially complete the last step of PoS upgrade; L2 such as Arbitrum and Optimism have gradually matured, while zkSync Era and StarkNet, based on ZK-Rollups, have also been launched on the mainnet, moving from theory to practice. 2024 Dencun upgrade, in which EIP-4844 introduces temporary data storage space, reducing L2 transaction fees by 90%. Following the Bitcoin ETF, the SEC approved the Ether spot ETF, symbolizing the beginning of Ethereum's acceptance by national governments and the traditional financial industry. Convergence: Convergence of traditional finance, smart accounts, into the private 2025 Pectra upgrade, allowing ordinary accounts to be converted into smart accounts, and the number of validator stakes from a fixed 32 ETH...