Today marks the sixth birthday of the Ethereum network and Ether – the world’s second-largest digital asset.
Ethereum was created by the crypto innovator Vitalik Buterin when the project was officially proposed in a white paper in late 2013.
The following January, a 20-year-old Buterin, headed down to the annual North American Bitcoin conference in Miami, Florida, clutching that white paper.
It’s there he met his Ethereum co-founders – a group of Canadian crypto evangelists who immediately saw the huge potential of Buterin’s idea.
Crammed into a little beach house, they invited Buterin to stay and turn his vision into reality.
Within six months, Vitalik had dropped out of the computer science program at the University of Waterloo, and moved out to Zug, Switzerland (now known as crypto valley) along with the rest of the group-turned-team.
The founding members of the Ethereum network included Gavin Wood (Solidity smart contract language creator), Anthony di Lorio (DeCentral founder), Joseph Lubin (ConsenSys founder), and Charles Hoskinson (Cardano founder).
After the completion of an $18m funding round in 2014, development begun and Ethereum slowly materialised as a viable decentralised network.
However, tensions between members set in and the team begun to unravel.
Charles Hoskinson was the first to go, many others would follow.
Today, only Buterin still works on the project.
After a period of successful testing on July 30, 2015 – the first block of Ethereum was mined and the Ethereum mainnet was launched.
The network has rapidly grown to become one of the most prominent components of DeFi and the crypto industry at large. However, a victim of its own success, gas and transaction fees have begun to slow.
This is why Ethereum is now preparing for an imminent scalability update to Ethereum 2.0.
Watch this space.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.