Ten-year-old Ethereum is starting to head towards Wall Street

The Ethereum mainnet has been online for a full ten years. During these ten years, it has not only witnessed the rise and fall of the entire blockchain industry but has also built an unprecedented "world computer" through repeated upgrades and consensus. Smart contracts, which were once underestimated, have now become the most universal operating system in the Web3 world. ETH has also grown from a few cents during its crowdfunding to an asset with a market value exceeding 300 billion dollars.

At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation has also completed an important "reshuffle". Internally, changes are happening, and externally, changes are occurring as well. Over the past year, a number of traditional financial background companies have successively bought ETH, and institutions such as SharpLink, BTCS, and BMNR have announced the inclusion of ETH in their strategic asset reserves.

All these changes took place in this special year: 2025, marking the tenth anniversary of the Ethereum mainnet launch.

This decade has been the most vibrant chapter in the history of blockchain. From a white paper to a global ecosystem worth hundreds of billions of dollars; from the founding team of "the Eight Kings" to breaking through as an island amidst the siege of "Ethereum killers"; from PoW to PoS, from a technical laboratory to public infrastructure, Ethereum has completed its first cycle.

But its real story may have just begun.

The "Prequel" of Ethereum

The focus of this stage is the split of the Ethereum founding team and ideological conflicts, occurring during the period of 2014-2015. Vitalik Buterin, the programmer genius who always talks eloquently about technology, always responds with "the matter of the 8 co-founders" when asked what his biggest regret in the Ethereum journey is. Clearly, the departure of these 8 founders has been a concern for him.

When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first 10 developers who responded and selected 5 of them for the leadership, which are the 5 founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit.

"This is obviously a very serious misjudgment. They looked like good people, and they wanted to help, so at the time I thought, why not let them be in leadership?" Vitalik said while reflecting on his decision at that time.

Regarding the co-founders of Ethereum, this is a controversial topic, and there are many versions online. Even the related entries on Wikipedia are constantly being edited and modified. After Vitalik "certified 8 co-founders" in person, the version widely recognized by the community is: after the 5 founders, three additional developers became co-founders in 2014: Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

At this point, Ethereum has completed the early formation of an 8-member core leadership group, reminiscent of the "Eight Kings' Politics" implemented in the early Yuan and Qing dynasties to prevent the emperor ( from acting unilaterally.

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) Berlin "Pilgrimage"

In the documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story" released last year, Vitalik recalled that he started his digital nomad life in mid-2013.

That was the prehistoric period of Ethereum, when Bitcoin was only $204, more than a year after Vitalik and Mihai Alisie founded Bitcoin Magazine. While building Ethereum, he traveled around the world at the invitation of communities globally. In 2013 and 2014, Ethereum had headquarters in Switzerland and Berlin, the white paper was released, Vitalik visited China to raise funds for Ethereum, and met with miners.

Berlin is the city where he has stayed for a long time.

"Pilgrimage", Vitalik describes his active participation in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin at that time. In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a few hundred meters, there are dozens of shops that accept BTC payments. The community center "Room 77" is also a hub where a diverse crowd, including tech developers, political activists, and others, often gather.

In this area, Ethereum rented an office just 1.5 kilometers away from the "Room 77" restaurant, which Vitalik can reach by walking in under 20 minutes. Now, if you search for the Ethereum office address "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps, you can see that this address is marked with Ethereum Network Launch ###30/07/2015(, along with a group photo of the early core members of Ethereum.

In early 2014, most of the core members of Ethereum were basically around Vitalik, and the Ethereum team was in a highly cohesive state.

At the Bitcoin conference in Miami in January that year, Vitalik and his co-founders stood together for the first time to showcase their project to the world. The effect was good, and Ethereum officially entered the public eye. However, this was also the eve of separation.

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) Swiss split

The entire year of 2014 was not so ordinary for the cryptocurrency world. The theft and bankruptcy of Mt.Gox caused a severe decline in the price of Bitcoin, dropping from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a decrease of up to 67%. It was also in this year that CZ sold his house in Shanghai and gambled on Bitcoin at a price of $600 to become the CTO of a certain trading platform. SBF, who had just graduated from MIT, was applying for jobs on Wall Street.

For Ethereum, 2014 was a significant year, featuring a crypto version of "The Great Silicon Valley Exodus". The split of this meeting determined the future direction of Ethereum.

On June 7, 2014, all members of Ethereum's leadership team were in Switzerland for an internal meeting, where the focus of the discussion was on the future direction of Ethereum. The meeting was held at the Spaceship house in Switzerland, which is the origin of ETH and also the first headquarters of Ethereum.

In fact, this topic had already been internally debated for a long time before this meeting, and factions had even emerged. The relationships within Ethereum became tense, "Should we use venture capital money or raise funds from ordinary people; should we pursue a profit model and become the Google of the crypto world, or remain a purely non-profit organization?" This became a recurring debate.

Vitalik recalled this memory and said: "I was once convinced to steer Ethereum towards a more corporate path. But this has never made me feel more comfortable, and it even made me feel a bit dirty."

It is said that this meeting, which determined the "life or death" of Ethereum, lasted an entire day. Vitalik's decision was to choose a decentralized and non-profit route. "I was trying to shirk responsibility throughout the process because I really didn't want to take on the responsibility, and in the end, I had to clear some people out."

This decision became the first turning point in the history of Ethereum, directly leading to the team's first major split.

Charles Hoskinson is the most prominent opponent in this conflict. He has always argued that Ethereum should become a commercial company, funded by venture capital, and then develop into a profitable tech giant. "A horizontal power structure means that janitors and executives would be on the same level, which is just insane."

After leaving Ethereum, Charles founded the development company IOHK###, which was later reorganized into a venture capital studio(, and launched a PoS public chain called Cardano. It has been a leading altcoin for several consecutive years, often referred to as the "Japanese Ethereum" due to its early focus on the Japanese market, and is also known as the first generation "Ethereum killer," consistently ranking in the top ten by market capitalization.

Following Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided to cease participation in core development and shifted focus to founding the incubator ConsenSys. In 2022, it completed a $450 million Series D funding round with a valuation of $7 billion, with investors including ParaFi Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund II, Microsoft, and other top VCs. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated a large number of blockchain startups and has built a series of rich ecosystem projects for Ethereum, the most successful of which is the wallet plugin MetaMask, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, generating weekly revenues of $300,000 and total revenues nearing $300 million.

Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second-generation rich kid, and his involvement in Ethereum was primarily to make more money. After Ethereum established a non-profit operational model, Anthony began to gradually step back, entering a semi-retirement state, creating Decentral and developing the Jaxx digital wallet, ultimately confirming his departure from Ethereum in December 2015. In 2018, Forbes estimated his net worth to be between $750 million and $1 billion, ranking him among the top 20 billionaires in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that he would 'liquidate' his position and exit the space based on personal safety considerations, deciding not to fund any blockchain projects and planning to devote himself to charity and other ventures.

Amir Chetrit left the Swiss conference after being criticized by other developers and founders for his lack of investment in Ethereum, and then he turned to other industries. Due to his emphasis on anonymity and privacy protection, there is very little information about him.

By the end of 2014, when the dust settled, only four of the original eight co-founders remained in the team: Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

Vitalik also reflected that he was too eager when selecting his team and did not consider the deep-seated differences among members, the conflicts of ideas, and the clashes of interests, which turned out to be much more complex than he had initially thought. "I did realize at that time that not everyone in the cryptocurrency field is striving for ideals like I am; many people just want to make a lot of money. The relationships between people are a real issue."

The work must continue, and Vitalik and the others who remain will carry on. Fortunately for Vitalik, the foundation was taking on more work at that time, and his most important technical partner, Gavin Wood, was still fighting alongside him.

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The Bumpy Foundation

July 30, 2015, was a historic moment for the launch of the Ethereum mainnet.

Some early members gathered in the Berlin office to witness the automatic launch of Ethereum after block 1028201. A photo of great historical significance captures some of the core members at that time. Those who were in the frame with Vitalik included several notable core developers:

Gustav Simonsson was an early security advisor for Ethereum and played a crucial role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity and continued to delve into the field of decentralized computing networks.

Christian Reitwiessner is the developer of the Solidity programming language, which provides the foundation for running smart contracts on Ethereum.

Liana Husikyan is also an important member of the Solidity development team, and she is one of the main developers of the Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment used for writing and deploying smart contracts, helping to simplify the development process of smart contracts.

Meanwhile, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it and one of the initiators of The DAO. Although in 2016 due to security