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Today is the fifth birthday of Ethereum - The Cryptonomist

source-logo  en.cryptonomist.ch 29 July 2020 02:00, UTC
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Today, July 30th, we celebrate an important birthday in the blockchain world because 5 years ago, the Ethereum blockchain came to life with the release of the first version of the project. 

We remember that, even if the first version was released on this date, Frontier, the work and the foundations were laid well before, when through the first commit the first information was written. It was Christmas Eve of 2013. 

Everyone knows that the founder of Ethereum is Vitalik Buterin, but few people know that behind the project there are also other people like Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie and Amir Chetrit. 

Later Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilke also joined the project. 

Ethereum started the project thanks to a Swiss company called Ethereum Switzerland GmbH (EthSuisse). Gavin Wood described the operation of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), explained in the famous Yellow Paper.

The ICO of Ethereum 

At that time the Ethereum Foundation was also created and all development was funded through an ICO in the summer of 2014, where ETHs were sold in exchange for Bitcoin (BTC).

Only in the first 2 weeks Ethereum had already collected over 25 thousand BTC and one of the largest transactions was 500 BTC, buying 1 million ETHs.

At that time 1 BTC was worth about $591 and therefore about 300 thousand dollars. Now those ETHs would be worth about $240 million, which compensates for the 500 BTC invested which would now be worth about $5 million.

Ethereum upgrades

In all these years there have been several blockchain updates to improve the protocol.

These are the most significant:

– July 30, 2015, release of Frontier;

– September 8, 2015, start of the Ice Age, at blockchain 200000;

– March 15, 2016, Homestead launched at block 1150000;

– July 20, 2016, the problem caused by The DAO generated Ethereum Classic at block 192000000;

– October 18, 2016, another problem this time related to network congestion, we are at block 2463000;

– November 23, 2016, we have Spurious Dragon at block 2675000;

– October 16, 2017, we have Byzantium, at block 4370000;

– February 28, 2019, we have Constantinople at block 728000000 which was then postponed due to a problem;

– December 8, 2019, it’s time for Istanbul to block 9069000;

– On January 1, 2020, Muir Glacier arrived at block 9200000.

The next updates will be on the PoS (Proof of Stake) to improve the scalability of the blockchain and also to have lower costs. 

In the meantime Ethereum has also become the reference point for various projects and sectors, such as decentralized finance (DeFi) which is setting new records.

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