A brief history of Ethereum : from whitepaper to the World Computer

What does this have to do with Thai investors?

If you've ever bought and sold Ethereum (ETH) through a Thai cryptocurrency exchange, such as Bitkub , you may not know that the coin has been around for over ten years. Knowing the history of ethereum helps to understand why it is used as the foundation of many blockchain applications rather than just specifically purchased digital assets.

Who started it?

Ethereum began with a paper called whitepaper that the young programmer Merv Vitalik Buterin released at the end of the year.2013 The main idea was to create blockchains that would run any program, not just do bitcoin-like payment transactions. Buterin calls this vision "the world's computer", which supports many more uses than networks that only make payments alone.

The project continued with several co-founders including Gavin Wood, author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper that defined how Ethereum Virtual Machine worked and Joseph Lubin who later founded blockchain software company ConsenSys. Funding was made through a large token sale in 2013,2014 which is considered one of the industry's first major token sales before the network officially launched on July 30.2015

A disruptive event that investors should be aware of.

The first phase of Ethereum was marked by the hacking of "The DAO " in 2015.2016 The DAO , a decentralized mutual fund built on top of Ethereum, led to a highly controversial network split via hard fork , resulting in two currently known networks: Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). This is why some exchanges have both coins for trading.

ERC-20 with wave ICO years.2017

The ERC-20 token standard grew significantly in the mid-to-late 1980s,2010 which made it easier for projects to launch their own tokens on Ethereum, and triggered a wave of token sales called ICO in 1999.2017 Although the ICO wave ended problematically in many cases, the underlying technology is still used today.

How did DeFi and NFT happen on Ethereum?

The years 2020 to 2021 are the period when decentralized finance, or DeFi , and non-replaceable tokens such as NFT , grew into mainstream use cases. Both of these were built on virtually all major Ethereum contracts; a side effect was that the network started getting tedious and fees, or so-called gas charges, went up. This problem accelerated the development of the layer 2 network which helped ease the burden on the core networks.

What is the Merge, and what's our path forward?

Ethereum's most significant technical milestone was "the Merge" in September,2022 which changed the network mechanism from proof-of-work to proof- of-stake, making business verification practices no longer dependent on high energy mining.

Ethereum's current roadmap still focuses on capacity expansion through layer 2 and improving data readiness, but the core of the project remains unchanged: it is a shared and programmable native layer for decentralized applications as originally proposed by Buterin in 2008.2013