Ethereum is the story of an innovative project that looked beyond the simple monetary question. While Bitcoin pioneered decentralised finance and peer-to-peer trading,
Ethereum raised another question: what if the blockchain had the ability to do more than just transfer money?
Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian prodigy with a passion for crypto-currencies and a born developer, put forward a bold idea in 2013: to design a decentralised platform capable of running autonomous programs, also known as smart contracts. These contracts make it possible for anyone, anywhere in the world, to design applications that work without a central server, without censorship and that cannot be stopped once they are up and running.This is how Ethereum was created.
The project was officially launched in July 2015, following an unprecedented crowdfunding campaign: the first ICO (Initial Coin Offering), which saw thousands of people invest bitcoins to obtain the first ETH tokens, Ethereum’s proprietary digital currency. From the outset, Ethereum did not present itself as a competitor to bitcoin. It was something else entirely: a decentralised global computer, an open infrastructure where anyone could build anything.
And it took off quickly.
Ethereum has given rise to an innovative ecosystem: Decentralised Finance (DeFi), NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations), blockchain-based games, metaverses and much more. Ethereum has started to be used as a gaming platform by developers around the world. They have set up financial institutions without intermediaries, designed digital artworks whose ownership can be verified, established credit platforms, created stablecoins and developed video games where users actually own their virtual assets… all achieved without the intervention of companies or managers, simply through self-executing code on the blockchain.
But this ambition comes at a cost. Like bitcoin, Ethereum initially operated on a proof-of-work system that required a large amount of energy. And the more the network was used, the more the transaction costs increased, sometimes reaching tens or even hundreds of dollars for a single operation. This created frustration and an urgency within the community to find a better way.
Ethereum reached a historic milestone in 2022 with the implementation of a significant update known as The Merge, after years of preparation. The network abandoned proof-of-work in favour of proof-of-stake, a mechanism where blocks are validated not by energy-consuming machines, but by users who stake their ETH to help secure the network. This has led to a reduction in energy consumption of more than 99%. This was a key moment in the history of blockchain.
Today, Ethereum is much more than a cryptographic project. It is a global platform, used by businesses, artists, governments, start-ups and online communities. It’s a constantly evolving innovation space where the wildest ideas come to life. Its crypto-currency, ETH, is now one of the world’s most heavily traded assets, with a market capitalisation of several hundred billion.But the journey is far from over. Ethereum continues to develop, optimise and adapt.
New updates aim to make it faster, cheaper and more robust. Its long-term ambition remains the same: to redefine the internet by making it more open, transparent and fair.
Ethereum is not just a technology. It’s a movement, a bet on collective intelligence, on the power of code and on the idea that we can build a digital world where the rules are no longer imposed from above, but programmed by everyone, for everyone.