Ethereum's 10th Anniversary: From the Eight Kings' Politics to Wall Street's New Darling

Ethereum is about to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its mainnet launch. Over the past decade, it has not only witnessed the rise and fall of the entire blockchain industry but has also built an unprecedented "world computer" through successive upgrades and consensus. Once overlooked, smart contracts have now become the most universal operating system in the Web3 world. ETH has grown from a few cents during its crowdfunding to a large asset with a market value exceeding 300 billion dollars.

At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation has also completed an important "blood change". Internally, changes are happening, and externally, changes are also taking place. Over the past year, a number of companies with traditional financial backgrounds have successively bought ETH, and institutions such as SharpLink, BTCS, and BMNR have announced that they will include ETH in their strategic asset reserves.

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

In the past decade, this 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 "Eight Kings' Governance" founding team to breaking out of the isolation amidst the siege of the "Ethereum Killers"; from PoW to PoS, from technical 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 and ideological conflict among the Ethereum founding team, during the period of 2014-2015. Vitalik Buterin, the programmer genius who always talks eloquently about technology, always responds that his biggest regret in the journey of Ethereum is the "8 co-founders issue" when asked. Clearly, these 8 co-founders who have long since departed are a concern for him.

When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first 10 developers who responded and selected 5 of them to form the leadership, namely the 5 founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit.

"This is clearly a very serious mistake in decision-making. They looked like good people and wanted to help, so at the time I thought, why not let them be in leadership?" Vitalik said while reflecting on his decision at that time.

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

At this point, Ethereum has completed the early formation of an 8-member core leadership group, resembling the "Eight Kings' Council" implemented in the early Yuan and Qing dynasties to prevent the emperor ( from acting arbitrarily.

![Ten-year-old Ethereum, beginning to walk towards Wall Street])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-c7a17afefa7859e486e353ce03d76289.webp(

) Berlin "Pilgrimage"

In the documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story" that was 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 since Vitalik and Mihai Alisie founded Bitcoin Magazine. During the construction of Ethereum, he traveled around the world 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 stays for a long time.

"Pilgrimage," Vitalik described his time actively participating in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin. In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a radius of a few hundred meters, there are more than a dozen shops that accept BTC payments. The community's central spot, the "Room 77" bar, is also a community hub where a diverse group of people, including tech developers and political activists, often visit.

In this area, Ethereum rented an office, only 1.5 kilometers away from the "Room 77" restaurant, and Vitalik can get there in less than 20 minutes on foot. Now, if you search for the address of the Ethereum office "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps, you can also see this address marked with Ethereum Network Launch ###30/07/2015(, as well as 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 around Vitalik, and the Ethereum team was in a highly cohesive state.

At the Bitcoin conference in Miami in January that year, Vitalik and his co-founders stood together for the first time to showcase their project to the world, and it went well, with Ethereum officially entering the public eye. However, this was also the eve of separation.

![Ten-year-old Ethereum begins its journey to Wall Street])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-9da3d3fda611441df9e82198248bccf1.webp(

) Swiss Split

The year 2014 was quite extraordinary for the cryptocurrency world. The theft and bankruptcy of Mt. Gox caused the price of Bitcoin to plummet severely, dropping from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a decline of 67%. It was also the year when CZ sold his house in Shanghai and went all-in on Bitcoin at a price of $600 to become the CTO of OK. SBF, who had just graduated from MIT, was busy applying for jobs on Wall Street.

For Ethereum, 2014 was an important year, witnessing a crypto version of "The Silicon Valley Eight Immortals Depart", and the split of this meeting determined the future direction of Ethereum.

June 7, 2014. All members of the leadership team of Ethereum gathered in Switzerland for an internal meeting, focusing on the future direction of Ethereum. The meeting was held at the Spaceship house in Switzerland. This is the birthplace of ETH and also the first headquarters of Ethereum.

In fact, long before this meeting, this topic had already been debated internally for a long time and had even given rise to factions. The internal relationships within Ethereum became tense, "Should we use venture capital funds, or should we crowdsource funds from ordinary people; should we pursue a profit model and become the Google of the crypto world, or should we be a purely non-profit organization?" This became an ongoing debate.

Vitalik recalled this memory and said: "I was once persuaded to lean towards a more enterprise-oriented path for Ethereum. But this has never made me feel more comfortable; in fact, it made me feel somewhat dirty."

It is said that this meeting, which determined the "life and death" of Ethereum, lasted an entire day, and Vitalik's decision was to choose the path of decentralization and non-profit. "I was trying to shirk responsibility throughout the process because I really didn't want to take on the responsibility, and 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 always argued that Ethereum should become a commercial company, obtaining funding through venture capital, and then developing into a profitable tech giant. "A horizontal power structure means that janitors and executives would be on the same level, which is just insane."

After leaving Ethereum, Charles founded the development company IOHK, which was later reorganized into a venture capital studio ###, and launched a PoS public chain called Cardano. It has been a leading altcoin for many years, often referred to as "Japan's Ethereum" due to its early focus on the Japanese market, and 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 turned to founding the incubator ConsenSys. In 2022, it completed a Series D funding round of $450 million with a valuation of $7 billion, with investors including ParaFi Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund II, Microsoft, and other top VCs. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated numerous blockchain startups and built a number of rich ecological projects for Ethereum. The most successful among these is the plugin wallet MetaMask, which is the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, generating weekly revenues of $300,000 and total revenues nearing $300 million.

Like Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second-generation rich kid, and his involvement in Ethereum was primarily to make more money. After Ethereum established a non-profit operational model, Anthony gradually retreated to the background, entering a semi-retirement state, created Decentral, and developed the Jaxx digital wallet. Ultimately, he 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 richest people in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that he decided to "liquidate" and exit the industry based on personal safety considerations, no longer funding any blockchain projects, and plans to focus on charity and other pursuits.

Amir Chetrit left due to a lack of investment in Ethereum, and he was criticized by other developers and founders at the conference in Switzerland. He then shifted to other industries, and because he has always 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 remained in the team: Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

Vitalik has also reflected that he was too hasty in selecting his team and did not take into account the deep-seated differences among members, the conflicts of ideas, and the clashes of interests, which turned out to be much more complicated than he initially imagined. "I did realize at that time that not everyone in the cryptocurrency field is fighting for ideals like I am; many people are just looking to make a lot of money. The relationships between people are a real issue."

The work must go on, and Vitalik and the others who stayed continue to work. Fortunately for Vitalik, the foundation was taking on more work at that time, and his most important technical partner, Gavin Wood, was still fighting alongside him.

Stumbling Foundation

July 30, 2015, is the historic moment when the Ethereum mainnet went live.

Some early members gathered in the Berlin office to witness the automatic launch of Ethereum after block 1028201. A historically significant photo captured some of the core members at that time. Those who shared the frame with Vitalik included several noteworthy core developers, such as:

Gustav Simonsson was an early security advisor for Ethereum and played a crucial role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity and continued 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 for writing and deploying smart contracts, which helps simplify the development process of smart contracts.

At the same time, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it and one of the initiators of The DAO. Although it led to a fork in 2016 due to security vulnerabilities, The DAO remains one of the most important 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 ( to Proof of Stake, and Jutta Steiner, who is the security lead of the Ethereum Foundation, who later became the CEO of Parity Technologies founded by Gavin ).

At the same time, there is also a detail in this photo that is often talked about: V