How Its Booms and Busts Shaped History

Ethereum celebrated its 10-year anniversary on Wednesday, with renewed institutional momentum fueling hopes that Ether (ETH) could challenge its all-time high that was set in November 2021.

Over the past decade, Ethereum has become the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) blockchain, with nearly $85 billion in total value locked (TVL) at the time of writing.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, circulated an early version of the white paper in 2013. The project raised $18.3 million in its initial coin offering (ICO) and officially launched in 2015 as a blockchain for smart contracts. Its cryptocurrency, Ether, now ranks as the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after Bitcoin (BTC).

Here’s a look back into Ethereum’s first decade, featuring the ICO boom, DeFi summer and the rise and fall of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

2015-2016: The birth of Ethereum and The DAO hack

In April 2016, The DAO launched as a decentralized venture capital project designed to let tokenholders vote on how the entity invests its funds. But it didn’t last long — it suffered an exploit worth around $60 million in June 2016. 

Throughout the decade, several Ethereum-based projects fell victim to cyberattacks. But this one is remembered as a critical bifurcation in Ethereum’s history, as developers and the community made a controversial decision to hard fork the blockchain and reverse the network to the moment before the theft.

This led to a permanent chain split. The new chain that came out of the fork continued with Ethereum’s brand and majority support. A smaller group remained on the original blockchain, which is now known as Ethereum Classic.

2017-2018: Ethereum explodes with the ICO boom

Ethereum was the go-to platform for ICOs, thanks to the rise of the ERC-20 token standard, which made it possible to launch token projects without the need to develop a new blockchain. Some projects were genuine. They used Ethereum’s ICO as a launchpad to migrate to their own networks (though plenty of them were useless.)

Ether surged from under $10 at the start of 2017 to a then-all-time high of about $1,450 by January 2018. Bitcoin also reached a new ceiling above $19,000 during the ICO craze.

The speculation wasn’t limited to ICOs….