It’s been 10 years since ethereum, the network that introduced smart contracts to the crypto world, mined its genesis block on July 30, 2015. Now the second-largest cryptocurrency behind bitcoin, with a market capitalization of $458.7 billion, the blockchain has come a long way since its initial goal to become a censorship-resistant global computer not controlled by any single party. 

Over its 10-year history, ethereum has evolved through a series of defining stages: breakthrough upgrades, financial experimentation, cultural mania, and increasing institutional adoption. It has also attracted scrutiny from regulators and weathered internal fractures and external competition. 

“Ethereum has evolved from a white paper idea into the most widely used platform for stablecoins, real-world assets, DeFi, and now even ETFs — signaling mainstream acceptance,” Kelly Ye, deputy chief investment officer of Avenir Group, told Sherwood News. “It proves ethereum is no longer just experimental; it’s a successful proof of concept for moving traditional finance onto blockchain rails.”

While the path to mainstream acceptance hasn’t been exactly smooth, each major milestone and mishap has, in its own way, been key to bringing ethereum to where it is today. 

2016: The DAO hack

Ethereum’s white paper, published by Vitalik Buterin in 2014, envisioned an alternative protocol for building decentralized applications, but the system’s promise was tested early. 

In 2016, the network faced its first existential crisis, stemming from a community-formed venture fund called The DAO, which raised roughly 12.7 million ethereum tokens. The DAO aimed to allow investors from anywhere in the world to pool capital and vote on how to invest the funds. However, an exploiter in June drained an insecure DAO smart contract for 3.6 million ethereum tokens.

According to Marc Zeller, founder of the Aave-Chan Initiative, The DAO first put ethereum on the map for the better, then for the worse as a result of its hack, which resulted in the chain being split in two. 

In the aftermath, the token holders voted and decided to execute a hard fork, effectively rewriting the network’s history to recover the stolen capital back from the hacker. 

The decision, which raised questions about immutability, was controversial as some “refused to fork because the DAO incident wasn’t a defect in the protocol,” ethereum.org states on its history page. “They [those who refused] went on to form Ethereum Classic.” 

2017-18: ICO booms and busts

In 2017, ethereum became the platform of choice for initial coin offerings, or ICOs.  

Similar to initial public offerings, where a company sells its shares to institutional and retail investors, ICOs became a popular mechanism for raising capital in the crypto space, eliminating the need for a mediator to facilitate investments. Users could invest in a blockchain project with cryptocurrency in exchange for tokens of the upcoming protocol. 

Krzysztof Urbański, head of governance of data analytics platform L2Beat, described the wave of ICOs in 2017 that continued into 2018 as “mania.” Web browser Brave raised $35 million in less than a minute, while Filecoin received $200 million within its first hour of its token sale. 

A 2018 study from Satis Group found that the lion’s share of ICOs launched were fraudulent. “As a percentage of the total number of ICOs, we found that approximately 78% of ICO’s were Identified Scams, ~4% Failed, ~3% had Gone Dead, and ~15% went on to trade on an exchange,” the research note said. It also noted that $1.3 billion of ICO funding was allocated to scams. 

For example, in December 2017, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced an emergency asset freeze to stop an ICO fraud called PlexCoin, which raised $15 million from thousands of investors. The SEC alleged that the person and company behind PlexCoin said investments in the ICO “would yield a 1,354 percent profit in less than 29 days.” 

Despite the litany of scams, the period gave birth to decentralized finance protocols still operating, such as lending platform Aave and decentralized exchange infrastructure firm 0x. For Ye, the ICO boom “showed strong interest in large-scale fundraising for emerging blockchain technology.” 

2020: DeFi Summer

Ethereum’s next inflection point came in 2020, during what industry participants called “DeFi Summer.” 

Decentralized finance protocols offered an alternative system for financial services sans banks, brokers, and centralized intermediaries. Using smart contracts and blockchain rails, internet users could now borrow, lend, and swap assets around the clock with a crypto wallet instead needing a credit score. 

DeFi Summer was evidence that smart contract platforms enabled applications that rivaled traditional finance. 

Uniswap, one of the earliest decentralized exchanges built on ethereum, also conducted its token airdrop in 2020. Total value locked in smart contracts belonging to decentralized finance protocols began in 2020 at roughly $602 million; by the end of the year, that figure jumped to $15 billion, a 2,391% increase, data from DefiLlama shows. 

“Being able to exchange assets in a trustless, non-custodial way has always been the core promise of crypto. And it’s here,” Eddy Lazzarin, the chief technology officer of venture capital fund a16z crypto, wrote in a 2020 note.

2021-22: NFTs dominate

NFTs may have been how many average people first learned or heard about crypto, as the assets most commonly associated with digital art of pixelated punks and laser-eyed profile pics made national news after the artist Beeple sold an NFT piece through art auction house Christie’s for a record $69 million. 

Celebrities and collectors purchased NFTs for millions of dollars, like deepak.eth, who acquired CryptoPunk #5822 from 0x7eb for $23.7 million while Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon showed off their Bored Apes on national TV. 

Weekly trading volume on NFT marketplaces exceeded $3 billion at their peak, a figure substantially higher than last week, when it stood at $213 million, per data from The Block — a stark reminder of how fast trends in the crypto space can fade. 

Still, the NFT scene in 2021 and 2022 was an early example of ethereum moving beyond finance and into mainstream culture, as celebrities from Reese Witherspoon to Tom Brady flaunted NFT profile pictures and public companies were launching NFT campaigns, including Nike and Salvatore Ferragamo. Even President Donald Trump released an NFT collection, and continues to drop new ones in 2025. 

2022: The Merge pulled off a remarkable feat 

The network’s most ambitious technical feat came in 2022 with The Merge, a years-in-the-making transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus, making ethereum the most prominent blockchain to accomplish such an undertaking. 

Joseph Schiarizzi, ethereum developer and founder of stablecoin provider Nerite, told Sherwood, “This upgrade was massive, like laying a new track in front of a moving train, and yet it went off with zero issues.”

The Merge not only changed the way the blockchain verified new transactions but also reduced the network’s carbon footprint by 99.99%, according to a 2022 report from the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute that was commissioned by ethereum software development firm Consensys. 

Despite the overhaul, the move arrived as competing chains — namely solana — started to gain traction. Aave-Chan Initiative’s Zeller said, “In 2022, the renaissance started, but [was] completely ignored due to the rise of solana and alt L1s.” 

Solana would go on to hit all-time highs in January 2025 while ethereum’s price would lag, as it has yet to reclaim its record set in 2021.

2025: Ethereum enters traditional finance

The network has joined the mainstream in light of the SEC approving spot ethereum ETFs, public companies embracing ethereum-focused treasury strategies, and traditional institutions building on the blockchain, such as BlackRock launching its first tokenized fund, called BUIDL, or Coinbase incubating a layer 2 network, Base, to help scale ethereum. 

“Each of these moments either demonstrated real use cases, strengthened the ecosystem, or attracted new stakeholders — all critical for network effects,” Avenir Group’s Ye said. 

L2Beat’s Urbański wrote to Sherwood, “2025 is the year crypto has truly entered the mainstream conversation — not just in finance or tech circles, but in policy, governance, and public discourse.” 

Congress also passed the GENIUS Act, a stablecoin-focused legislative bill expected to benefit ethereum because it hosts the largest stablecoin supply across all blockchains. 

What the next decade may hold

For Preston Van Loon, an ethereum core developer, the anniversary is significant because it shows a decade of uninterrupted operation, with the network running continuously since genesis without downtime. He told Sherwood, “That kind of resilience through technical challenges and upgrades reflects a deep level of reliability and trustworthiness, the kind that has become the foundation of the entire ecosystem.” 

Ethereum’s first decade is now behind us, yet network participants insist the network is just getting started. 

“The infrastructure is only now supporting record levels of real-world usage, particularly in areas like stablecoins,” Van Loon said. “That emerging maturity means the network is just starting to show its full potential.” 

Ye added that real-world assets issued on-chain and stablecoins are “only starting to scale — suggesting we’re still early relative to where finance and the internet were 10 to 20 years after their inception.”

She also pointed out that ethereum still has technical debt.

The next upgrade for the network is slated for the end of 2025, and ethereum still has a lot to do on its road map.

“Ten years is still young. Today I am still as excited about the current road map for the next 10 years as I was 10 years ago,” Schiarizi said.