Ethereum Genesis Block 10th Anniversary: The Myth of the World Computer in Progress

In 2011, 17-year-old Russian-Canadian teenager Vitalik Buterin wrote articles for the "Bitcoin Weekly" website, earning 5 bitcoins per article, equivalent to $1.30 per hour. These 5 bitcoins are now worth $600,000, a rise of hundreds of thousands of times that witnesses the crazy growth of the cryptocurrency era.

Even more shocking is that the development speed of Ethereum, created by Vitalik, is on par with Bitcoin itself: now with a market value of over $400 billion, it carries an annual transaction volume of over $50 trillion.

This article reviews the ten years since the launch of the Ethereum genesis block, which also marks a decade of fervor in the blockchain industry. It explores how it transformed from the imagination of a young writer into the infrastructure that changes the operational logic of the digital world, and how the changes at the technical grassroots level have led to the migration of the superstructure.

Prehistoric Story - Bitcoin is the Beginning of Dreams

Inspired by Bitcoin to the creator of Ethereum

In 2013, the surge in Bitcoin prices ignited Vitalik's limitless imagination, but it also revealed to him the limitations of Bitcoin. As a writer for Bitcoin Magazine, he discovered that this revolutionary financial system faced difficulties in expanding beyond the dimension of a mere financial product.

At that time, the concept of smart contracts in the blockchain world was still vague, with no definitions, samples, or direction. In the initial vision, contracts only supported fixed function scripts like simple multi-signatures and time-locking, far from being called a "world computer," let alone intelligent.

Vitalik advocated for a more refined programming language to Bitcoin core developers, but the conservatism of the Bitcoin community fundamentally conflicts with his vision of a more universal and open blockchain. Various market expansion proposals are merely patching things up, and no one dares to propose a complete redesign solution.

So he decided to develop a new platform. At the end of 2013, during a long walk in San Francisco, Vitalik suddenly realized that contracts could be generalized - if they are smart contracts, they can itself be mature accounts, able to hold, send, and receive assets, and even maintain a permanent storage state. Why not take it a step further and design a virtual machine that can execute any computation?

The initial design of Ethereum adopted a register-based architecture with a novel fee mechanism: for each computational step executed, the contract balance would decrease, and execution would stop if the funds were exhausted. This was the early prototype of the "contract payment" model, which later evolved into the "sender pays" and Gas system.

At the end of 2013, Vitalik wrote the Ethereum white paper, with the core goal of defining - to create a general-purpose decentralized computing platform where anyone can deploy and run decentralized applications, not fixed-function scripts, but a truly Turing-complete computing environment.

There is a huge gap between the ideal vision and the achievable technical specifications. In 2014, Gavin Wood joined in writing the famous "Ethereum Yellow Paper", which is the official technical specification for the operation process of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

The white paper depicts the "why" and "what", while the yellow paper precisely defines the "how". Together, the two documents bring Ethereum from concept to reality.

in Berlin key technology decision-making and evolution

In 2014-2015, Berlin became the spiritual home of Ethereum. Vitalik often frequented the Bitcoin Kiez area, and Room 77 was an early gathering place for the crypto community. Not far away, the core team was coding day and night in their office.

During this stage, the Ethereum protocol has undergone countless technical iterations: from a register-based architecture to a stack-based architecture, from a "contract-paid" system to a "sender-paid" Gas system, and from asynchronous internal transaction calls to synchronous execution. Many decisions have far-reaching implications.

The EVM unifies the 256-bit integer model, initially designed to accommodate the bit widths commonly used in hash functions and encryption algorithms, avoiding overflow risks. It may seem overly conservative, but it is naturally suited for the complex high-precision mathematical operations in DeFi, circumventing precision issues found in JS/float-type languages.

The transaction exhausts Gas and the entire execution rolls back instead of partially completing, eliminating the "partial execution attack" and becoming the cornerstone of smart contract security. This design has economic incentives; technically, it is impossible to predict the required Gas before execution, and the sender is more motivated to control costs and behavior, avoiding blindly sending transactions.

Technical creativity brings unexpected surprises, such as Vitalik's initial concept of asynchronous contract call models, but when Gavin Wood implemented it, he naturally adopted synchronous calls based on engineering and semantic consistency considerations. This seemingly unintentional deviation laid the critical technical foundation for later DeFi composability – allowing one contract to synchronously return execution results when calling another, creating the predictability and atomicity of "money Legos."

The interdependence among Ethereum DeFi applications is high; it is not a single ecosystem. For example, lending protocols use DAI/USDC as collateral, and the stablecoin minting module calls Chainlink as an oracle. Many market-making protocols are based on Aave and Compound to provide leverage. In this series of interactions, synchronous calls play an indispensable role. However, there are pros and cons; due to the difficulties in performance expansion with synchronous calls, Ethereum will have to choose a more complex scaling approach in the future.

The POW mining algorithm has undergone multiple iterations, from Vitalik's proposed Dagger algorithm, to the Dagger-Hashimoto developed in collaboration with Thaddeus Dryja, and then to the Ethash that emphasizes ASIC resistance. Throughout this process, there have been constant attempts at adaptive difficulty, memory-hard structures, and random access circuits.

Of course, many difficulties come with unexpected joys, which naturally also become subsequent technical debts. In 2025, when Vitalik proposed replacing the EVM with RISC-V, he candidly stated: "Ethereum has often failed to maintain simplicity throughout its history. ( Sometimes due to my own decisions ), it has led to excessive development costs, various security risks, often in pursuit of what has proven to be illusory benefits."

Historic Moment: July 30, 2015

On July 30, 2015, Vitalik recalled the scene at the Berlin office: "Many developers gathered, and we were all watching the Ethereum testnet block count reach 1028201, as this marked the automatic launch of the mainnet. I still remember us sitting there waiting, and then finally reaching this number, and about half a minute later, Ethereum blocks started generating."

At that time, there were less than 100 developers in total for Ethereum, and the entire ecosystem was a technical experiment. The first decentralized Twitter application "EtherTweet" had an interface as rudimentary as the "Wright brothers' plane," and sending a tweet required paying a high on-chain fee. Smart contracts were still just a few geek toys, and DeFi, NFT, and Layer 2 only existed in the imagination of white papers.

Now searching for that address on Google Maps, you can still see the label "Ethereum Network Launch (30/07/2015)", as well as a group photo of the early core members of Ethereum - that is one of the most important photos in crypto history.

On July 30, 2025, when Ethereum celebrates its tenth anniversary, as of the first half of 2025:

• In the first quarter of 2025, a record 6.1 million wallets participated in on-chain governance voting.

• Ethereum adds approximately 350,000 new wallets each week, benefiting from users joining through Layer 2s.

• As of March 2025, the number of active Ethereum wallets reached 127 million, a year-on-year increase of 22%.

• Leading the stablecoin market by far, with a market capitalization of 82.1 billion USD, accounting for 60.0% of the total market capitalization.

• The TVL of various DeFi protocols exceeds 45 billion USD.

• A certain DEX has a daily trading volume exceeding 2.1 billion USD, and a certain lending platform holds a total of over 13 billion USD in locked assets.

• In the past 12 months, the Ethereum core repository recorded over 28,400 GitHub commits.

• The number of active developers contributing to Ethereum-related projects is currently over 5,200.

This "marginal experiment", which once had fewer than 100 developers involved, has grown into the largest development platform and ecosystem in the Web3 world.

In the past ten years, from a few daily transactions to an annual processing value of 50 trillion dollars, from several dollars in transaction fees to less than 1 cent in small costs on Layer 2, from power consumption like a small country's PoW mining to consuming even less power than a large building's PoS mechanism, from a rudimentary EtherTweet demo application to a mature DeFi ecosystem priced 80% in ETH - behind every number lies the relentless efforts of countless developers and the trust choices of users. When the U.S. SEC approved 9 ETH spot ETFs and the first-day trading volume exceeded 1 billion dollars, this once "marginal experiment in cryptocurrency" has become a large-scale asset ranking among the world's top, causing increasingly profound impacts at the core of the mainstream financial system.

However, the journey from a teenager in the Berlin office to a new generation of global financial infrastructure builders has not been smooth sailing. Over the past decade, Ethereum has undergone growing pains from technological upgrades, tests from hacker attacks, market cycle baptisms, and countless critical choices concerning survival. Each crisis is a reshaping, each upgrade is a transformation, and each controversy is a growth opportunity. It is these ups and downs at critical junctures that have shaped the Ethereum we see today.

Let us return to those decisive moments and re-examine how this legend was forged in the midst of storms.

Ten-Year Journey - Key Milestones and Evolution Logic

2015-2017: From Genesis to Hard Forks and the ICO Craze

The launch of the Ethereum mainnet that summer marked the beginning of the era of smart contracts.

In the early days, Ethereum was like an experimental technology demonstration platform, not a truly usable product. Most of the applications running on the network were simple demo applications - such as EtherTweet(, a decentralized Twitter clone), WeiFund(, a crowdfunding platform), and various rudimentary voting contracts.

The instability of Gas prices makes every interaction feel like gambling, and sometimes it takes an hour to get on-chain. What's even more frustrating for developers is that the Solidity language is still very immature, and the compiler often has strange bugs like variable shadowing, stack overflow, and jump logic errors(. The security of smart contracts often relies on the personal experience of the developer.

Despite the immature technology, the Ethereum community displays an unprecedented idealistic enthusiasm. Weekly developer meetings are always packed with programmers from around the world, discussing how to reconstruct the entire world with smart contracts - from autonomous organizations to prediction markets, from identity systems to supply chain management, it indeed seems to be flourishing everywhere. Moreover, this optimism is mixed with an almost fervent belief: code is law, math is truth, and decentralization is freedom.

With this sentiment, in May 2016, a project called "The DAO" was launched on Ethereum, hailed as "the largest crowdfunding experiment in human history." In just 28 days, it raised 150 million dollars worth of ETH), accounting for 14%-15% of the entire network, becoming the largest venture capital fund in the world at that time.

At this moment, a huge crisis quietly arrived. On June 17, a hacker successfully exploited a reentrancy attack vulnerability in The DAO smart contract, stealing 3.6 million ETH, which accounted for about 5% of the total supply of Ethereum at that time.

The core of this attack lies in the typical reentrancy vulnerability in the design of the splitDAO function in The DAO smart contract - a classic attack pattern later included in smart contract security textbooks.

When a user calls the separate DAO function, the contract performs the following steps: first, it sends rewards to the user through the withdrawRewardFor function, and only then updates the user balance. The problem lies in that the withdrawRewardFor function ultimately uses the call.value() method to send ETH( to the recipient using the underlying call)(, where using such a low-level transfer mechanism is also a point of concern). Then, when the recipient(, the attacker) contract receives ETH, its fallback function is triggered, and then it immediately calls the splitDAO function again. This creates a re-entry( reentrancy attack), as the first call has not yet been completed( and the balance has not been updated), allowing the attacker to repeatedly withdraw funds based on the same balance.

The attacker deployed two identical malicious contracts, achieving 29 repeated withdrawals through recursive calls. Each withdrawal was calculated based on the same original balance, ultimately successfully transferring tens of millions of dollars' worth of ETH to their controlled sub-DAO. Ironically, this vulnerability was in