Ten Years of Ethereum: From "Silicon Valley Eight Immortals" to Wall Street

It seems that in order to celebrate this significant 10th anniversary, Ethereum is once again pushing towards the 4000 dollar mark.

Since the mainnet launch on July 30, 2015, by today in 2025, it has witnessed not only the rise and fall of the entire blockchain industry over the past decade but has also built an unprecedented "World Computer" through upgrades and consensus. Once undervalued, smart contracts have now become the most widely used operating system in the Web3 world. Ethereum has also grown from a few dimes during its crowdfunding to a market value exceeding $300 billion.

At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation has also completed an important "blood exchange". Internally, things are changing, and externally, things are also changing. Over the past year, a number of companies with traditional financial backgrounds have gradually bought Ether, with institutions such as SharpLink, BTCS, and BMNR announcing that they will include Ether in their strategic asset reserves.

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

The past decade has been the most colorful chapter in the history of blockchain. From a white paper to a global ecosystem worth hundreds of billions of dollars; from the founding team to breaking out as an island amidst the siege of "Ethereum killers"; from proof of work to proof of stake, from technology laboratories 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 the conflict of ideas, taking place between 2014 and 2015. Vitalik Buterin, the programmer genius who always speaks eloquently about technology, often responds that his greatest regret in the Ethereum journey is "the matter of the 8 co-founders" when asked about it. Clearly, these 8 founders who have long since departed are a concern for him.

When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the top 10 developers who responded and selected 5 of them to form the leadership team, 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 wrong decision. They look like good people, and they want to help, so at that time I thought, why not let them be in leadership?" Vitalik said when reflecting on his decision at that time.

Regarding the co-founder of Ethereum, this is a controversial topic, and there are many versions online, with even the relevant entries on Wikipedia being continuously edited and modified. After Vitalik "certified 8 co-founders" himself, the widely recognized version in the community is: after the 5 founders, three more developers became co-founders in 2014: Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

Thus, Ethereum has completed the early formation of an 8-member core leadership group, which is very similar to the "Eight Kings' Council" implemented during the early Yuan Dynasty to prevent the emperor ( from exercising autocratic power.

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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. During the construction of Ethereum, he traveled globally due to invitations from various communities. 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 described his time active in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin. In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a few hundred meters, there are more than a dozen shops that accept Bitcoin payments. The community center "Room 77" is also a community hub, frequented by a diverse crowd including tech developers, political activists, and others.

Just near this area, Ethereum rented an office, which is only 1.5 kilometers away from "Room 77" restaurant, and Vitalik can walk there in less than 20 minutes. Now if you search for the Ethereum office address "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps, you can also 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 at that time.

In early 2014, most of the core members of Ethereum were basically by Vitalik's side, and the Ethereum team was in a state of high cohesion.

At the Bitcoin conference in Miami in January that year, Vitalik and his co-founders stood together for the first time to present their project to the world, and the response was good, with Ethereum officially entering 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 drop in the price of Bitcoin, falling from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a decline of 67%. It was also in this year that CZ sold his house in Shanghai and went all in on Bitcoin at a price of $600, taking on the role of CTO at a certain platform. SBF, who had just graduated from MIT, was sending out resumes on Wall Street.

For Ethereum, 2014 was an important year, staging a crypto version of "Silicon Valley's Eight Immortals Leaving", and the split from this conference determined the future direction of Ethereum.

On June 7, 2014, all the leadership members of Ethereum attended an internal meeting in Switzerland, where the focus of the discussion was the future direction of Ethereum. The meeting was held at the Spaceship house in Switzerland, which was chosen as the venue. This is the origin of Ethereum and also its first headquarters.

In fact, before this meeting, this topic had been internally debated for a long time, and factions had already emerged. The internal relations of Ethereum became tense, "Should we take money from venture capital funding, or should we raise funds through crowdfunding from all ordinary people; should we pursue a profit-driven path to become the Google of the crypto industry, or should we be a purely non-profit organization?" This became an ongoing debate.

Vitalik recalled this memory saying: "I was once persuaded to lean towards making Ethereum more enterprise-oriented. But this never made me feel more comfortable, it even made me feel a bit dirty."

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

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

Charles Hoskinson is the most prominent opponent in this conflict. He has consistently argued that Ethereum should become a commercial company, obtaining funding through 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 crazy."

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

Following closely after Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided to step away from core development and turn to founding the incubator ConsenSys. In 2022, it completed a Series D funding round of $450 million at a valuation of $7 billion, with investors including ParaFi Capital, Temasek, the 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 these is the wallet extension MetaMask, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, which generates weekly revenue of $300,000 and total revenue of nearly $300 million.

Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second-generation rich kid, and his reason for participating in Ethereum was to make more money. Therefore, after Ethereum established a non-profit operational model, Anthony gradually began to step back, entering a semi-retired state, founded Decentral, developed the Jaxx digital wallet, and ultimately confirmed his departure from Ethereum in December 2015. In 2018, Forbes estimated his net worth to be between $750 million and $1 billion, placing him among the top 20 wealthiest individuals in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that for personal safety reasons, he decided to "liquidate" and exit the industry, no longer funding any blockchain projects, and plans to focus on charity and other endeavors.

Amir Chetrit left due to a lack of investment in Ethereum and was criticized by other developers and founders at the conference in Switzerland. He later ventured into other industries, and because he has remained anonymous and focused on 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, Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie, and Jeffrey Wilcke, remained in the team.

Vitalik also reflected that he was too eager when selecting his team and did not consider the deep-seated differences between members, the conflicts of ideas, and the collisions of interests, which were far more complex than he initially imagined. "I did realize at that time that not everyone in the cryptocurrency space is fighting for ideals like I am; many people really 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 continue to work. Fortunately for Vitalik, the foundation was taking on more work at the time, and his most important technical partner, Gavin Wood, was still fighting alongside him.

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Bumpy Foundation

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

Some early members gathered in the Berlin office to witness the automatic launch of Ethereum after block 1028201. A photograph of great historical significance captured some of the core members of that time. Those in the frame with Vitalik included several notable core developers such as:

Gustav Simonsson is an early security advisor for Ethereum, playing a crucial role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity, continuing 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.

In the Solidity development team, Liana Husikyan is also an important member, as 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 streamline the development process of smart contracts.

Meanwhile, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it and one of the initiators of The DAO. Although it experienced a fork in 2016 due to security vulnerabilities, The DAO remains one of the most significant experiments in blockchain history, driving the exploration of decentralized governance models.

In addition, there are Fabian Vogelsteller, the author of ERC 20 and ERC 725, Vlad Zamfir who promoted the transition of Ethereum from Proof of Work )PoW( to Proof of Stake, and the security officer of the Ethereum Foundation.