Ethereum History in 5 Minutes

A quick retelling of the history of Ethereum using pretty pictures and quotes from prominent writings.

Each visualization is built directly from on-chain and other data, and accompanies quotes from the wonderful books of Cami Russo and Matt Leising along with some resources from the great EthHub, Zima Red, The Defiant, and ethereum.org.

2013–2015

“In April 2014…Gavin published the Ethereum Yellow Paper, a technical specification of Vitalik’s white paper. While the [2013] white paper described the concept of Ethereum for the first time…the Yellow Paper dove into the exact details, the nuts and bolts of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.” (Russo, p. 113)

“WPYP Chromosome.” Blending thousands of elements from the white (2013) and yellow (2014) papers, in almost their entirety. See here for more detail.

“At the start of the [2014] sale…one bitcoin bought 2,000 ether…When investors sent their bitcoin to the EthSuisse wallet…[t]hey got an Ethereum wallet and password.” (Russo, pp. 133-134)

“Inject BTC.” The crowdsale had many purchasers (dots above) use bitcoin, flowing into the sale wallet (bottom left). See here for more details.

“…the amount of money raised was also a reflection of an intensely anticipated project led by a teenager hailed as a genius coder, building the next-generation blockchain.” (Russo, p. 141)

“Bridging BTC.” Linking crowdsale purchasers (orange) to their future Ethereum wallets (dotted). More details here.

“On the night of July 30 [2015], Vitalik, Jeff, Gav and other developers like Vlad Zamfir were waiting for the countdown… ‘And then the network launched,’ Vitalik said.” (Leising, p. 221)

“Birth.” The crowdsale Bitcoin wallet (36PrZ) leads to the birth of the Ethereum mainnet in 2015, its first transactions shown. More detail here.

2014–2016

“They hadn’t done two separate versions intentionally [2014]…It was also safer to have multiple clients in case one implementation got attacked.” (Russo, p. 113)

“Clients.” The codebase of the two major Ethereum clients, one in Go and the other in Rust, on the backdrop of their yellow paper specification. See here for more details.

“By the end of the day [July 2015], Vitalik and Gavin congregated around the TV and the rest of the developers followed. Some cracked open a beer as they stood together watching the block number tick up.” (Russo, p. 155)

“Big Bang.” The first transactions from 2015 July’s genesis, node size reflects crowdsale ether, branching into new projects. See here for description.

“The attack had begun [June, 2016]. Thousands of these small transactions would accrue throughout the day as the theft continued. People all over the world watched as it occurred, helpless to stop it. Eventually $55 million of ether was stolen, making it the largest digital heist in history at the time.” (Leising, p. 4)

“Reentrancy.” Major depositors to the DAO, which held over $100 million in ether, and the reentrancy attack that drained more than $50 million (dark lines) and the recovery of ether (light lines). See here.

“…as the Ethereum community watched a new version of their blockchain was born. Or, to be precise, their old blockchain wouldn’t die. It came to be known as Ethereum Classic, or ETC.” (Leising, p. 240)

“Hardest Fork.” Reverting ether balances by hard fork, block hashes leading into the hard fork of mid 2016, and Ethereum Classic splits off into its own future (green). See here for more description.

2017–2020

“At first, there was about one ICO per week, then it was one every couple of days, and then there could be up to two in the same day. Every other week an ICO seemed to completely dwarf the previous mammoth one.” (Russo, p. 235)

“Proliferation.” Peaking in 2017, the “Initial Coin Offering” era was built almost entirely on Ethereum. See here for more summary.

“Ethereum was now worth over $100 billion. Traders were piling into the market so quickly, they momentarily crashed some of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges.” (Russo, p. 278)

“Mania.” Ethereum (dark blue) was among other cryptocurrencies seeing explosive rise in speculative value in 2017, only to rapidly collapse in 2018. Acoss time (x-axis), coins (colors) have their metrics peak near January 2018 then fall. See here for more details.

“The golden child of DeFi, Uniswap, has even eclipsed popular centralized exchanges in trading volume like Coinbase Pro and Kraken.” (The Defiant)

“Swapcircuit.” Clockwise “swaps” on Uniswap in September, 2020, when the project began to approach $1 billion in daily volume. See here for description.

“OpenSea is the first decentralized, peer-to-peer marketplace for blockchain-based assets, which include crypto collectibles, gaming items, and other assets backed by a blockchain.” (EthHub)

“The Open Sea.” Thousands of sales of collectibles on Ethereum (via OpenSea). An entire marketplace of digital goods has been built upon Ethereum. See here for summary.

2020 — future

“The scripting language used by Ethereum is Turing-complete, essentially meaning that the types of DApps users can design is limited only by their programming skills and creativity…which can include games, digital collectibles, online-voting systems, financial products and many others.” (EthHub)

“TCP/IP.” Is Ethereum (base circles) becoming TCP/IP of programmable finance? Here, for several major projects related to decentralized finance, any variation seen in this simple diagram is a reflection from raw data. See here for more details.

“The metaverse is a virtual environment where people live, work, and play. You can think of it as being similar to the virtual world ‘OASIS’ in the movie Ready Player One, but instead of a central corporation controlling everything, users in the metaverse control their own assets.” (Zima Red)

“The Metaverse.” There are thousands of lands and connections here. The edges connecting these lands mean they are owned by the same user. Details here.

“Sharding is a multi-phase upgrade to improve Ethereum’s scalability and capacity. Shard chains spread the network’s load across 64 new chains. Shard chains should ship sometime in 2021.” (ethereum.org)

“64 Shards.” The 64 future shards are depicted with the very first 64 slot roots associated with the Beacon chain. The codebase for the Go-based (Prysm, green) and Rust-based (Lighthouse, orange) clients stitch these symbolic shards into one structure. See here.

“The Beacon Chain will introduce proof-of-stake to Ethereum…Think of it like a public good that will make Ethereum healthier and earn you more ETH in the process. In practice, it will involve you [depositing] ETH in order to activate validator software. As a validator you’ll process transactions and create new blocks in the chain.” (ethereum.org)

“Deposits.” See here.

Nodes are arrayed on a circular graph folded onto itself and jittered. Edges reflect the many deposits, and lines shown are numbered proportionally for each depositor’s on-chain data. The blue pool of expanding deposits has its radius locked onto a cumulative sum of ether put into the contract, ending at its outer ring with over 2% of all ether…we see depicted the future of Ethereum — the promise of orders of magnitude scaling in transaction throughput... [w]e await its future.

Takens Theorem uses Twitter. See ethstory.eth.link for lots of detail about this project and its origins. These visuals were auctioned as NFTs, and all proceeds went to charities (including GiveDirectly, GiveWell, Rainforest Foundation US, and more; see ethstory.eth.link for on-chain proof of these donations).