10 years on, Ethereum has rebuilt itself time and again without compromising on its values, community members say

Consensys and Ethereum founder Joe Lubin rang the closing bell at the Nasdaq exchange in New York City on Wednesday, commemorating his latest enterprise, Sharplink Gaming (SBET), and Ethereum’s 10-year anniversary.

Sharplink is one of a number of so-called Ethereum treasury companies that have formed in recent months amid a boom in corporate interest in crypto. The firm's ETH strategy management is being run by a handful of Consensys employees.

It's hard to see why companies wouldn't be interested in ETH, given that the asset has jumped nearly 1.2 million percent since its early fundraising period. The asset is now a currency that powers the most-used blockchain, the so-called world computer, that, 10 years on, is beginning to deliver on its initial promise.

"Ethereum is today already so much more than I ever thought it could be, and we've barely scratched the surface of all the use cases I have thought about," Paul Brody, head of blockchain at EY, told The Block. "The future of Ethereum is one of ever-growing expansion as it becomes the foundational plumbing not just for finance but really for all commerce over time."

Ethereum's beginnings

The world’s second-largest blockchain has its beginnings in 2013, when the idea of a Bitcoin-like platform that could run applications came to the young cypherpunk Vitalik Buterin. If Bitcoin was attempting to make money itself decentralized and censorship-resistant, why couldn’t anything online be the same?

"10 years ago, Ethereum was a revolutionary idea. Today, it’s the common denominator among many revolutions happening on the Internet," Fileverse founder Andreas told The Block.

Soon enough, a whitepaper was published in 2013, written by Buterin, which outlined his vision. Then there was a crowdfunding campaign in 2014, the second-largest Kickstarter campaign at the time, that funded early development. Before anyone knew it, Ethereum was underway.

Ten years from the date it officially launched, July 30, 2015, some of Ethereum's biggest supporters remain amazed that it happened at all.

"I don't think you could launch Ethereum today," Senior Counsel and Director of Global Regulatory Matters at Consensys Bill Hughes said. "It required a specific time, the right set of idealistic volunteers, and a commitment to explore an entirely unknown intersection between computer science, economics, and psychology. We really had one brief window to give to decentralized software and processing infrastructure a chance and that it is working is in some sense a miracle."

Ups and downs

Part of the issue is simply Ethereum’s many trials and tribulations, after which many detractors — and even supporters — would often declare the network dead. There was the DAO hack, of course, which was the basis for a contentious network rollback to recover the millions in stolen ETH. But there have also been regulatory hurdles, rising competition, and upgrades so challenging they’re sometimes compared to changing an airplane’s engine mid-flight.

"Despite everyone calling it dead multiple times over the years, and the difficulties it’s faced, at times for very valid reasons, we’re at a place now where it’s clearly becoming the backbone for the next global financial system," Miden founder Azeem Khan said.

"Ethereum’s most incredible feature is that it refuses to die. It can't," early Ethereum supporter and 0xbow co-founder Zak Cole said. "Against all odds, through forks, failures, regulatory attacks, and civil wars, it’s become the substrate for the future of finance. No one predicted the DAO hack, DeFi summer, or the NFT explosion. We just built through it."

There was also the persistent issue of network costs — in the bull market of 2017, when Ethereum launched numerous projects, the network became a victim of its own success, with gas fees practically making it unusable. This set Ethereum off on the path towards scalability, which is today being achieved by a series of Layer 2s and mainnet improvements.

"Ten years on, it has seen zero downtime, overcome insurmountable odds, and punctuated every moment with unimaginable victories," said Kraken’s Joseph Delong, founder of Sushi.

It's a point echoed by pseudonymous developer and Ethereum Foundation advisor Aleph, who noted that Ethereum has consistently been able to "safely update and upgrade its tech stack while staying faithful to the goals of the project."

"Looking forward, there are a large number of changes and upgrades in the works which may fundamentally change Ethereum's tech again, making it more accessible, usable, and performant, but again, without compromising core values," she added.

Even those who are more critical of Ethereum, like Jito Foundation contributor Andrew Thurman, note that Ethereum has stayed true to its values of being globally accessible and permissionless. "Ethereum's greatest contribution to the ecosystem -- and one in which it comfortably eclipses even Bitcoin -- is its ability to attract, foster, and empower an ever-growing population of developers and contributors," Thurman said.

Looking ahead

Now, as Ethereum continues to grow and change, as corporate America begins to adopt it , the network and community will face a new set of challenges.

“The most important question for Ethereum over the next decade is whether it can retain its identity, particularly its cypherpunk values, as the widening stakeholder set attempts to dilute them," Paul Dylan-Ennis, University of Dublin lecturer, said.