Ethereum Mainnet 10th Anniversary: From the Genesis Eight to Key Figures in the Decentralization Community

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

Looking back at the ten-year development of Ethereum, from the founding eight 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 creation of a Turing-complete blockchain platform to support decentralized application development. This idea attracted Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit to join, forming the initial team. Later, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke also joined, forming the "Ethereum founding team". However, the team's differences in ideology and goals eventually led to the later split.

Vitalik Buterin

As the founder and spiritual leader of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin's life trajectory is closely linked to the world of cryptocurrency. At the age of 6, he immigrated to Canada with his family, where he early on showcased his talents in mathematics, programming, and economics. At 17, he learned about Bitcoin from his father. Interestingly, he mentioned that one of the motivations for creating Ethereum stemmed from Blizzard's weakening of the skills of his beloved character in World of Warcraft, which made him deeply understand the drawbacks of centralized services.

In 2011, to earn Bitcoin, he began writing for blogs and met Mihai Alisie, with whom he co-founded "Bitcoin Magazine". In 2013, after visiting various crypto projects around the world, he believed that Bitcoin's functionality was limited and published the Ethereum white paper. After receiving the Thiel Fellowship in 2014, he dropped out of the University of Waterloo and devoted himself full-time to Ethereum development.

As the helm of Ethereum, Vitalik continues to lead the evolution of the technical roadmap. On September 15, 2022, Ethereum completed "The Merge," transitioning to a PoS consensus mechanism, reducing energy consumption by 99%. On April 12, 2023, the Shapella upgrade was completed, allowing stakers to withdraw ETH for the first time. On June 9 of the same year, he published "The Three Transitions," proposing the three major transitions that Ethereum must undergo for future maturity: L2 scaling, wallet security, and privacy protection.

Recently, Vitalik's thoughts have become deeper. In June 2025, he stated at the ETHGlobal Prague conference that Ethereum L1 will achieve approximately 10 times scalability within a year. On July 2, at the EthCC conference in France, he again warned that decentralization cannot remain just a slogan and proposed three core standards to evaluate decentralization.

In addition to his technical contributions, Vitalik is also actively involved in charitable activities, donating billions of dollars in crypto assets to various foundations and relief projects. At the same time, he expresses deep concern about the potential risks of AI and advocates for a defensive, decentralized, and democratic "d/acc" technology development philosophy.

Charles Hoskinson

Charles Hoskinson was the CEO of Ethereum and studied mathematics at the University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder in his early years. In 2013, he founded the "Bitcoin Education Project".

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

After leaving, Hoskinson 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 (ADA), known for its rigorous academic research style and peer-review mechanism, and is referred to as "Japan's Ethereum" or the first generation "Ethereum killer."

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 1 million dollars, while Cardano (ADA) has even greater growth potential, possibly rising 100 times or even 1000 times.

In addition to the cryptocurrency field, Hoskinson is also involved in charity and politics. He donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University to establish a center for formal mathematics and funded Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb's deep-sea exploration project to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. In February 2025, he announced the establishment of a political action committee called "Wyoming Integrity."

Anthony Di Iorio

As a wealthy second-generation heir and angel investor, Anthony Di Iorio is one of the key figures who funded the launch of Ethereum. After learning about Bitcoin through a podcast in 2012, he organized Bitcoin meetups in Toronto, met Vitalik Buterin, and promoted the release of the Ethereum white paper.

Di Iorio's initial intention to participate in Ethereum was to make money, so when the team decided to operate in a non-profit model in 2014, he began to lose interest and gradually faded out of the core circle.

After leaving, Di Iorio's business landscape continued to expand. In 2014, he founded the blockchain company Decentral in Toronto, launching the local first two-way Bitcoin ATM. In 2016, he created the multi-currency wallet Jaxx Liberty and briefly served as the first Chief Digital Officer of the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Although he stated in 2021 that he would withdraw from the cryptocurrency space for security reasons, he doesn't seem to have completely left. In 2022, he launched the Andiami project, aimed at addressing the centralization issues in decentralized networks. Recently, he has been active on social media, asking "When will Musk issue a coin?" and analyzing the rollback history of Ethereum DAO.

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 due to its wide range of application scenarios, Ethereum may surpass Bitcoin in market value.

Amir Chetrit

Amir Chetrit is the most low-key of the eight co-founders of Ethereum. He holds dual citizenship in the United States and Israel and was involved in the real estate industry in his early years. In 2013, he met Vitalik Buterin at the Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam and was invited to join the Ethereum project. At that time, he was participating in an Israeli startup project called "Colored Coins."

At the Swiss conference in June 2014, Chetrit was questioned for his limited contributions to the project and ultimately agreed to withdraw from the core team while retaining his title as co-founder. Since then, he has rarely appeared in the public eye and is reportedly currently supporting multiple blockchain projects discreetly.

Gavin Wood

As the first CTO of Ethereum, Gavin Wood transformed Vitalik Buterin's blueprint into real code and is hailed as the "invisible brain" of Ethereum. He wrote the "yellow paper" that defines the technical specifications of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and led the development of the smart contract programming language Solidity, laying the technical foundation for the Ethereum ecosystem.

However, just three months after the Ethereum Mainnet was launched in 2015, Wood chose to leave. He had differences with Vitalik regarding the engineering management model, believing that the project needed more efficient centralized management, while Vitalik insisted on a decentralized community-driven model.

After leaving, Wood founded Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation, and created the cross-chain network Polkadot. In October 2022, he resigned as CEO of Parity and took on the role of Chief Architect. In April 2024, he released a gray paper for a new generation architecture of Polkadot called JAM. In June of this year, he stated that he had no intention of issuing new tokens based on the JAM protocol.

Joseph Lubin

Joseph Lubin is the one with the strongest business background 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 chose not to participate in core development anymore, but instead founded ConsenSys, a software technology company and incubator focused on the Ethereum ecosystem.

Over the past decade, ConsenSys has become one of the most important forces in the Ethereum ecosystem, incubating numerous blockchain startups and contributing many key infrastructures and applications such as MetaMask, Infura, and Truffle.

Recently, Lubin and ConsenSys have been attracting attention. On May 27, ConsenSys led a private fundraising of approximately $425 million for SharpLink Gaming, with Lubin serving as the chairman of the board. In response to the community's doubts about MetaMask not issuing tokens, Lubin has hinted multiple times that ConsenSys products will launch tokens in the future. Currently, Linea has announced that 10% of tokens will be allocated to early contributors, with 9% airdropped to users participating in Linea voyages.

Lubin has always been a staunch advocate of Ethereum. In May, he wrote in the Financial Times that blockchain networks like Ethereum can provide a new type of decentralized infrastructure for the global financial system, coexisting and complementing the existing system.

Mihai Alisie

Mihai Alisie was a close ally of Vitalik Buterin before the birth of Ethereum. In 2011, the two co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, with Alisie serving as editor-in-chief until the end of 2013. This collaboration laid the groundwork for their later creation of Ethereum.

In the early days of Ethereum, Alisie played a key role. He was responsible for establishing the necessary business infrastructure and legal framework for the project in Switzerland, facilitating the presale activities of Ethereum, which raised over 31,000 Bitcoins. As a co-founder, strategic manager, and vice president of the Ethereum Foundation, he managed early operations until the end of 2015.

Alisie's exit was relatively peaceful. In 2015, he founded the decentralized social project Akasha based on Ethereum and IPFS, continuing to develop within the ecosystem. On the occasion of Ethereum's tenth anniversary, he published a post celebrating and co-hosted events with ETHGlobal, POAP, and others, encouraging the community to share their stories with Ethereum.

Jeffrey Wilcke

Jeffrey Wilcke and Gavin Wood are the core forces behind the early technical implementation of Ethereum. He came into contact with the Ethereum white paper while working on the Mastercoin project, and subsequently wrote the implementation version of Ethereum in Go.