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Ethereum Celebrates Six Years Since Blockchain Launch

Exactly six years ago, Vitalik Buterin’s team launched a new blockchain – Ethereum. Over the years, Ethereum has become the main platform for DeFi applications and token issuance, including NFT.

A bit of history

Ethereum was originally created not so much as a payment system, but as a base for decentralized applications and interaction with third-party projects.

In 2013, Vitalik Buterin proposed the concept of Ethereum, and a year later he won the World Technology Award for this idea, beating Mark Zuckerberg and other contenders.

The last test version, called Olympic, was released in May 2015. At the Olympic stage, users were even offered a reward of 25 thousand ETH for discovering weaknesses in the blockchain code.

On July 30, 2015, the first fully functional version of Ethereum 1.0, known as Frontier, was released, and a block with a height of 0 was generated. It was intended for tech-savvy users, primarily developers. In the first stage, the security of the network was not guaranteed.

In March 2016, the developers announced the launch of the stable version of Ethereum – Homestead (1.3, activated on block 1,150,000).

By this time, Ethereum had attracted the attention of large companies. Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio, commenting on the events, said:

“We saw Microsoft and IBM embark on projects on Ethereum. We see a lot of coders. It’s great when the project you were on from the beginning starts to pay off.”

Together with Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum was co-founded by Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Joseph Lubin and Charles Hoskinson. Gradually, all the co-founders left the team and started their own projects.

“Cherries” on cakes

In the six years since its inception, the network has matured and successfully withstood several global shocks. Firstly, the almost catastrophic hacking of the 2016 DAO smart contract and the hacker’s withdrawal of about $ 50 million in tokens – a third of the collected as a result of the crowdsale. It was followed by an equally dramatic hard fork that split the Ethereum community into two camps. As a result, two separate blockchains appeared: Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The mainnet has retained most of the key players, enjoys a better reputation, high investment, and runs the vast majority of applications. Ethereum currently has the second largest market capitalization and is second only to Bitcoin. But he is also much younger: in five months, Bitcoin will be 13 years old!

The Ethereum platform has outperformed its major smart contract competitors, fueled by a surge in taking advantage of decentralized finance and anticipating significant upgrades.

EY ICO Market analyzed the work of 372 cryptocurrency projects. Studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of ICOs use the Ethereum platform – 77%, private platforms are in second place – 13%, Waves closes the top three – 4%. investigation, ICO cost.

Analysts at the American bank JP Morgan explain the popularity of Ethereum by the fact that it is more often used on crypto platforms that allow lending outside of traditional banks. At the same time, banking specialists believe that ether can grow further, there is space for this.

Ethereum ideologist and founder Vitalik Buterin, answering journalists’ questions about the reason for the success of his project, said:

“In my opinion, cryptocurrency is at the same time a kind of moral project. If you only care about capitalization and creating an expensive token that will help you get rich, the project will not be successful in the long run. There have been many projects that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital funds. But in reality, hundreds of millions of dollars cannot buy a soul. And I think that many have stumbled on this, ”he said.

In society, the founder of Ethereum is known, among other things, for his interest in biotechnology and the topic of aging. In 2018, he donated $ 2.4 million to the SENS Research Foundation for research into rejuvenation and human life extension.

The sixth anniversary will most likely be the last for Ethereum 1.0. In early 2022, it will be replaced by Ethereum 2.0, a faster and more energy efficient model. Ethereum 2.0 will scale the original blockchain and make it more user-friendly. The main feature of the update is the network’s transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus – it will replace the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus that Ethereum is currently running on.

Competitive environment

For a while, the Cardano platform has been a pretty promising smart contract platform. It was founded by former Ethereum co-founder, mathematician Charles Hoskinson. In 2014, he decided to leave the project, after which he started to create a non-profit IOHK Foundation.

In 2018, in the city of Zug, Switzerland, Kathleen & Arthur Breitman, with the assistance of Johann Gevers, who was previously involved in the Ethereum ICO, founded Tezos. Tezos is so far the most decentralized PoS blockchain in the world in terms of the number of validators. Since Tezos did not have an upper limit for the number of nodes, this allows it to become more and more decentralized. Over time, it will be able to compete with Ethereum 2.0 in the area of ​​decentralization.

Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, after serving as the CTO of the Ethereum Foundation for several years, realized that Ethereum’s design was actually limited. Therefore, he developed a technical document for the Polkadot project, and later launched its first network – Kusama.

In addition to the projects listed above, other closest competitors of Ethereum can be mentioned. According to analysts, these are the Cosmos, Filecoin and Solana blockchains.

The full implementation of Ethereum 2.0 is likely to happen within a few years. During this time, everything can change dramatically. Although, even if Ethereum retains its leadership, then each of the competing platforms will have a place for their own prosperity.

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