Ethereum Turns 10: How a Decade of Decentralization Rewrote the Rules of Finance

Ten years ago, a whitepaper changed everything. Ethereum didn’t just introduce smart contracts—it built the playground where DeFi, NFTs, and a trillion-dollar ecosystem would erupt. Here’s how the rebel protocol outmaneuvered Wall Street’s gatekeepers.

The Code That Cut Out the Middlemen

No bankers. No lawyers. Just unstoppable code executing deals at the speed of the internet. Ethereum’s smart contracts turned financial agreements into self-enforcing apps—slashing costs, bypassing bureaucracy, and making TradFi’s legacy systems look like fax machines.

Gas Fees: The Price of Revolution

Scaling wasn’t smooth. Congestion pushed transaction fees to absurd highs during bull runs—ironic for a system designed to democratize finance. (Wall Street snickered, then quietly started buying ETH.)

The World Computer’s Next Decade

With the Merge completed and layer-2 networks flourishing, Ethereum’s finally delivering on its early promises. Meanwhile, hedge funds that mocked "internet money" now allocate 5% portfolios to it—because nothing screams conviction like FOMO dressed as strategy.

Dreams Turned Into Reality

Founded in 2013 by Buterin and a pioneering team, Ethereum’s ambitious vision was to transcend Bitcoin’s capabilities by introducing programmable smart contracts. Early proponents, including Gavin Wood, author of the seminal Ethereum Yellow Paper, were instrumental in propagating and realizing this revolutionary idea.

Ethereum turns 10 today 🎉

Born from Canadian Vitalik Buterin’s 2013 whitepaper, Ethereum launched on July 30, 2015 and reshaped the internet.

Smart contracts, DeFi, DAOs, tokenized assets…Ethereum laid the foundation for the future of Web3.

Happy Birthday, ETH! 🎂🥳 #ETH10 pic.twitter.com/yCpnzJ8zCw

In mid-2014, the Ethereum Foundation held a public presale, successfully raising over 31,000 BTC, equivalent to more than $18.3 million at the time, by selling 60 million ETH. This crucial early funding provided the impetus for the network’s development and expansion, laying the groundwork for the decentralized applications that WOULD define its future.

A Decade of Milestones

Since it was created in block on July 30, 2015, Ethereum has become the second-largest blockchain in the world by market cap. It has enabled pioneering developments along the way such as decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, DAOs, Layer-2 scaling, and zero-knowledge proofs.

Did not blink an eyelid amidst major setbacks such as the DAO debacle and follow-up hard fork, and behemoth upgrades such as The Merge, which allowed Ethereum to change its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Consensys, refers to the network as “the definition of antifragile,” having run with “non-stop uptime” and having become a secure digital platform that is today utilized by big institutions such as BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Visa.

Ethereum offers a borderless, transparent, and decentralized financial architecture, opening up entirely new avenues of growth and innovation and enabling far greater economic and political agency for people and communities. Beyond finance, Ethereum will serve as critical…

The Next Ten Years: AI, Robotics, and Beyond

In the future, Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak foresees Ethereum as the bedrock for emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and decentralized infrastructure. “Privacy, censorship resistance, and security aren’t just features they’re values,” he added.

Hsiao-Wei Wang, the Foundation’s second Co-Executive Director, views Ethereum as evolving into a “global computer” organically built into daily life, but warns that to achieve this will mean scaling out while preserving accessibility and affordability and still having decentralization.

In 10 years time, Ethereum will become the global computer seamlessly embedded in daily life.

Used by billions, invisible in the stack, and still decentralized at its core.

A Historic Milestone

To celebrate the 10-year milestone, the Ethereum community is hosting the “Ten Years of Ethereum” livestream, featuring Vitalik Buterin, Tim Beiko, Joseph Lubin, and other prominent members.

Developer Lefteris Karapetsas celebrated the milestone with a look back to the start, when a group of hackers in Berlin introduced a network that would revolutionize everything about how value is exchanged online. “What will you build?” he asks the next generation of coders.

It was this day 10 years ago, 30th of July 2015, that we changed the world forever.

We were a small team of hackers in an office in Kreuzberg in Berlin and we had just launched the @ethereum network.

The rest is history.

Looking back at the last 10 years, I am excited about… pic.twitter.com/bXHJEgmi2u

As Ethereum embarks on its second decade, it transcends mere technology; it represents a testament to hardiness, a robust economic infrastructure, and a profound cultural transformation. From the early “ICO madness” to the sophisticated Layer-2 solutions addressing scalability, Ethereum’s journey has been undeniably nonlinear, a truth few would dispute. Yet, its transformative impact remains beyond doubt.

Also Read: eToro to Launch Tokenized Stocks on Ethereum in August