Ethereum Genesis Block 10th Anniversary: The Myth of the World Computer in Progress

In 2011, a 17-year-old Russian-Canadian boy began writing articles for the "Bitcoin Weekly" website, receiving 5 bitcoins for each article, equivalent to $1.30 per hour. This boy was Vitalik Buterin, who later created Ethereum, which now has a market value of over $400 billion and processes more than $50 trillion in transactions annually.

Let us review the ten years since the launch of the Ethereum genesis block, a decade of rapid change in the blockchain industry, and see how it has transformed from a young person's imagination into the infrastructure that changes the operating logic of the digital world. What kind of superstructure migration has been brought about by the transformation of the technical foundation during this process?

Prehistoric Story - Bitcoin is the Beginning of Dreams

Inspired by Bitcoin to the creator of Ethereum

In 2013, the soaring price of Bitcoin sparked Vitalik's limitless imagination, but it also made him see the limitations of Bitcoin. As a contributor to Bitcoin Magazine, he found it extremely difficult to make the blockchain system go beyond being merely a financial product.

At that time, in the world of blockchain, smart contracts were still a vague concept, lacking definition, samples, and direction. The initial idea was to support some fixed-function scripts, such as simple multi-signatures, time locks, or bilateral contracts that allowed participants to allocate profits based on preset formulas. This scripting language was not Turing complete at all, far from being a "world computer", let alone intelligent.

Vitalik once suggested to Bitcoin core developers that the Bitcoin platform should have a more robust programming language. However, the conservatism of the Bitcoin community fundamentally conflicted with his vision of a more universal and open blockchain. At that time, various scaling solutions were being patched together, and no one dared to propose a completely new design solution.

So he made a world-changing decision: to develop a new platform.

At the end of 2013, while walking in San Francisco, Vitalik suddenly realized that contracts could be generalized - if they are smart contracts, they can be fully mature accounts that hold, send, and receive assets, and even maintain permanent storage states. Why not design a virtual machine that can execute arbitrary computations?

The original design of Ethereum adopted a register-based architecture, with a novel fee mechanism built in: for every computation step executed, the contract balance would decrease slightly, and execution would stop when funds were depleted. This was an early prototype of the "contract payment" model, which later evolved into the "sender pays" and Gas systems.

At the end of 2013, Vitalik wrote the Ethereum white paper, which defined the goal - to create a general-purpose decentralized computing platform where anyone can deploy and run decentralized applications, not fixed-function scripts, but a truly Turing-complete computing environment.

However, there is a huge gap between the ideal vision and the achievable technical specifications. In 2014, Gavin Wood joined as a key turning point. He wrote the famous "Ethereum Yellow Paper," which is the formal technical specification for the operation of the Ethereum virtual machine.

The white paper outlines the "why" and "what", while the yellow paper precisely defines the "how". The combination of these two documents brings Ethereum from concept to reality.

in Berlin's key technology decisions and evolution

From 2014 to 2015, Berlin became the spiritual home of Ethereum. Vitalik was often active in the Bitcoin Kiez area, and Room 77 became a gathering place for the early crypto community. Meanwhile, at the office located at Waldemarstraße 37A, the core team of Ethereum was coding day and night.

At this stage, the Ethereum protocol has undergone countless technical iterations: transitioning from a register-based architecture to a stack-based architecture, evolving from a "contract-paid" model to a "sender-paid" Gas system, changing from asynchronous internal transaction calls to synchronous execution, with many decisions having far-reaching impacts.

For example, the EVM unified 256-bit integer model was originally designed to accommodate the common bit width of hash functions and encryption algorithms, while avoiding overflow risks. Although it seemed overly conservative at the time, it naturally adapted to the complex high-precision mathematical operations in DeFi and also circumvented the precision issues found in JS/float type languages.

Moreover, if the transaction runs out of Gas, the entire execution rolls back instead of partially completing, which eliminates the entire attack surface of "partial execution attacks" and becomes the cornerstone of security for all smart contracts that followed. This design also has economic incentives; on one hand, the Gas required for contract execution cannot be predicted beforehand, and on the other hand, failure results in losses, so senders are more motivated to control costs and behavior, avoiding blindly sending transactions.

The team's technical creativity has brought many unexpected surprises, such as Vitalik's initial conception of the asynchronous contract call model, but Gavin Wood, based on considerations of engineering and semantic consistency, naturally adopted synchronous calls during the implementation process. This seemingly unintentional deviation laid the key technical foundation for the later composability of DeFi - allowing a contract to synchronously return execution results when calling another, creating the predictability and atomicity of "money Legos."

The interdependence among Ethereum DeFi applications is relatively high; they do not exist in isolation. For example, lending protocols use DAI/USDC as collateral, while stablecoin mint modules call Chainlink for oracle services. Many market-making protocols leverage Aave and Compound for providing leverage. This series of interactions relies heavily on synchronous calls. However, there are both advantages and disadvantages; due to the challenges in performance expansion caused by synchronous calls, Ethereum has no choice but to adopt more complex scaling solutions.

The POW mining algorithm has also gone through multiple iterations, from the Dagger algorithm proposed by Vitalik, to Dagger-Hashimoto developed in collaboration with Thaddeus Dryja, and then to Ethash, which emphasizes ASIC resistance. Throughout these processes, there have been continuous attempts at adaptive difficulty, memory-hard structures, random access circuits, and other directions.

Of course, many difficulties come with unexpected joys, which naturally also become subsequent technical debts. In 2025, when Vitalik proposed replacing the EVM with RISC-V, he admitted: "Ethereum has often failed to maintain simplicity throughout its history. Sometimes this is due to my own decisions (, which has led to our excessive development expenses and various security risks, often in pursuit of what has proven to be illusory benefits."

) A historic moment: July 30, 2015

On July 30, 2015, Vitalik still remembers the scene in the Berlin office: "A lot of developers gathered together, and we were all watching the block count on the Ethereum testnet reach 1028201, because that marked the automatic launch of the Ethereum mainnet. I still remember us sitting there waiting, and then it finally reached this number, and about half a minute later, Ethereum blocks started to be generated."

At that moment, there were only less than 100 developers in total for Ethereum, and the entire ecosystem was merely a technical experiment. The first decentralized Twitter application "EtherTweet" had a user interface as rudimentary as the "Wright brothers' plane", and posting a tweet required paying high on-chain fees. Smart contracts were still just toys for a few geeks, and DeFi, NFT, and Layer 2 existed only in the imagination of white papers.

Now, searching for that address on Google Maps, you can still see the marked "Ethereum Network Launch ###30/07/2015(", as well as a group photo of the early core members of Ethereum - that is one of the most important photos in crypto history.

On July 30, 2025, when Ethereum celebrates its tenth anniversary, as of the first half of 2025:

• In the first quarter of 2025, a record 6.1 million wallets participated in on-chain governance voting.

• Ethereum adds approximately 350,000 new wallets each week, thanks to users joining through Layer 2s.

• As of March 2025, the number of active Ethereum wallets reached 127 million, a year-on-year increase of 22%.

• A is far ahead in the stablecoin market, with a market capitalization of 82.1 billion USD, accounting for 60.0% of the total market cap.

• The total locked value (TVL) of various DeFi protocols has exceeded 45 billion USD.

• Uniswap's daily trading volume exceeds $2.1 billion, while lending platforms like Aave and Compound collectively hold over $13 billion in locked assets.

• In the past 12 months, Ethereum has recorded over 28,400 GitHub commits in its core repository.

• The number of active developers contributing to Ethereum-related projects is currently over 5,200.

There are many more data points that the author will not list here. What I want to express is that this "marginal experiment", which once had fewer than 100 developers involved, has now grown into the largest development platform and ecosystem in the Web3 world.

In the past decade, from a few daily transactions to an annual value transfer of $50 trillion, from the high costs of several dollars per transaction to less than 1 cent on Layer 2, from the electricity consumption of a small country in PoW mining to a PoS mechanism that consumes even less electricity than a large building, from the rudimentary EtherTweet demonstration application to a mature DeFi ecosystem priced at 80% in ETH - behind each number lies the relentless efforts of countless developers and the trust choices of users. And when the US SEC approved 9 ETH spot ETFs and the first-day trading volume exceeded $1 billion, this once "marginal experiment in cryptocurrency" has become a large-scale asset ranking among the top globally, at the core of the mainstream financial system, causing increasingly far-reaching effects.

However, the journey from a teenager in the Berlin office to a creator of the new generation of global financial infrastructure has not been smooth sailing. Over the past decade, Ethereum has experienced the growing pains of technological upgrades, the trials of hacker attacks, the baptism of market cycles, and countless critical choices that could mean life or death. Each crisis has been a reshaping, each upgrade a transformation, and each controversy a growth opportunity. It is these pivotal moments of ups and downs that have shaped the Ethereum we see today.

Let us return to those decisive moments and re-examine how this legend was forged in the storm.

![OKX Research Institute | Ethereum Genesis Block 10th Anniversary: The Myth of the World Computer in Progress])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-f96eb0969f202ab725ca7dfa06b2a125.webp(

Ten-Year Journey - Key Milestones and Evolution Logic

) 2015-2017: From Genesis to Hard Forks and the ICO Frenzy

The summer when the Ethereum mainnet was launched marked the beginning of the era of smart contracts.

The early Ethereum was more like an experimental technology demonstration platform rather than a truly usable product. Most of the applications running on the network were simple demo applications - such as EtherTweet(, a decentralized Twitter clone), WeiFund### crowdfunding platform(, and various rudimentary voting contracts.

The instability of Gas prices makes every interaction feel like a gamble; sometimes it can take an hour to get on-chain. What's even more frustrating for developers is that the Solidity language is still very immature, and the compiler often has strange bugs like variable shadowing, stack overflow, and jump logic errors. The security of smart contracts often relies on the personal experience of the developer.

Despite the immaturity of the technology, the Ethereum community has shown an unprecedented idealistic enthusiasm. Weekly developer meetings are always packed with programmers from around the world discussing how to reconstruct the entire world with smart contracts - from decentralized organizations to prediction markets, from identity systems to supply chain management, it truly seems to be flourishing everywhere. Moreover, this optimism is mixed with an almost intense belief: code is law, mathematics is truth, and decentralization is freedom.

With this sentiment, in May 2016, a project called "The DAO" was launched on Ethereum, hailed as "the largest crowdfunding experiment in human history." In just 28 days, it raised ETH worth 150 million dollars, accounting for 14%-15% of the entire network, becoming the largest venture capital fund in the world at that time.

At this time, a huge crisis quietly arrived. On June 17, a hacker successfully stole using the reentrancy attack ) Reentrancy Attack ( vulnerability in The DAO smart contract.