Ethereum

Ethereum is the world's leading smart contract platform, conceived in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin in a whitepaper written when he was 19 years old, and launched on 30 July 2015 after a 2014 crowdsale. While Bitcoin introduced decentralised money, Ethereum introduced decentralised computing — a global, programmable blockchain where developers can build and deploy applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, or third-party interference. The original co-founders included Buterin, Gavin Wood (who wrote the Yellow Paper formalising the EVM and later founded Polkadot), Charles Hoskinson (who later founded Cardano), Joseph Lubin (who founded ConsenSys), and several others.

Smart contracts are self-executing programs stored on the Ethereum blockchain that automatically enforce the terms of an agreement when predefined conditions are met. This simple concept has spawned entirely new industries: decentralised finance (DeFi) with hundreds of billions in total value locked at peak, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing digital ownership, decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) governing multi-billion-dollar treasuries, on-chain identity, coordination games, and much more. Roughly 60% of stablecoin supply and the majority of on-chain USD volume settle on Ethereum or Ethereum-secured L2s, making it the closest thing crypto has to a global settlement layer.

Ethereum's history includes several defining events. The 2016 DAO hack — a $60M smart-contract exploit — triggered a contentious hard fork that produced Ethereum (ETH, the forked chain that reversed the hack) and Ethereum Classic (ETC, the original chain). In September 2022, Ethereum completed 'The Merge,' transitioning from energy-intensive Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus using a beacon chain that had been running in parallel since December 2020. This reduced Ethereum's energy consumption by approximately 99.95% overnight — one of the most consequential engineering pivots in crypto history. In March 2024 the Dencun upgrade shipped EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), introducing 'blob' data availability that cut Layer 2 costs by an order of magnitude.

The network continues to evolve through a multi-phase roadmap known as the 'Surge, Scourge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge' — covering rollup scalability, MEV mitigation, statelessness, state cleanup, and miscellaneous improvements respectively. The rollup-centric roadmap explicitly assumes most user activity moves to Layer 2 rollups (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync, Scroll, and dozens more), with Ethereum L1 evolving into a settlement and data-availability layer. As of 2026 this transition is well underway: the majority of transactions and users have moved to L2s, though the bulk of the highest-value transactions still settle on L1.