Crypto competition is at its peak with Ethereum still retaining its second spot on coinmarketcap. On the 30th of July 2015, a historic event was being scripted by an unknown coder in an unknown location. Sit back and enjoy while we take you down the lane to the most impactful innovation in blockchain.

Humble beginnings, Ethereum as a competitor to Bitcoin!

Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin has already become a global tech icon and a tech genius. As one Ethereum Co-Founder and ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin put it, for a platform that has over 700 tokens and 1,100 apps released within its ecosystem

“It was unprecedented, many people said that it [Ethereum] could not be done; many people said that it was stupid to do it because the attack service would be so big and fuzzy. And it turned out to be a remarkable success, in my opinion.”

Vitalik Buterin a programmer involved with Bitcoin Magazine, in late 2013 had a goal of building decentralized applications. His Idea was and which heartedly he argued was that Bitcoin on its own wasn’t sufficient and it needed a scripting language for application development that could cater to a variety of functions. Failing to gain agreement from the then geniuses, he proposed the development of a new platform with a more general scripting language

“I thought [those in the Bitcoin community] weren’t approaching the problem in the right way. I thought they were going after individual applications; they were trying to kind of explicitly support each [use case] in a sort of Swiss Army knife protocol.”

This thought by Vitalik was the core motivation that drove him to develop Bitcoin’s biggest rival.

Formal development of the Ethereum software project began in early 2014 through a Swiss company, Ethereum Switzerland GmbH (EthSuisse). At the time of the public announcement in January 2014, the core Ethereum team was Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson.

What followed next and continued for there years was simply pathbreaking.

The RISE of Ethereum

Early 2013: Vitalik Buterin first describes Ethereum on paper

Late 2013: Buterin proposes the development of a new platform with a general scripting language

Early 2014: Swiss company EthSuisse develops the first Ethereum software

July 22, 2014: Ethereum launches a public pre-sale of ETH.

September 2, 2014: Pre-sale investors receive 60 million ETH of which 12 million is allocated to dev team

October 2014: Ethereum protocol permits the creation of 5 ETH for every block mined

May 2015: the Last prototype named Olympic released.

July 30th, 2015: Frontier, the first version of Ethereum is launched.

March 14th, 2016: Homestead, the first stable version of Ethereum was launched

May 2016: DAO raises a record $150 million in crowd sale.

June 18th, 2016: The DAO was hacked by an anonymous group, $50m stolen. The event sparks debate within the community.

July 2, 2016: As a result, less than a year after their launch, the network splits into two groups: Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

July 28, 2016: Ethereum foundation, developers, business partners, miners, and users of the Ethereum ecosystem disassociate themselves with ETC.

Feb 2017: Ethereum reaches a market cap of 1 billion for the first time.

March 2017: Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) formed.

May 19, 2017: The price of ETH crosses $100 mark for the first time.

June 2017: Russia endorses Ethereum which crosses $400 mark as the result of the surge in momentum.

October 16, 2017: “Metropolis Part 1: Byzantium”, the first part of the third version of the platform launched.

December 2017: The best month for cryptocurrency starts. Ethereum breaks the $800 mark.

January 14, 2018: Highest valuation of the cryptocurrency reaches. Priced at $1,418, the daily trading volume approaches $10 billion while the market cap is at astronomical $135billion.

April 6, 2018: The lowest point of 2018 reached. Price of the coin back under $400.

May 2018: Market bounces back. Ethereum crosses $800 mark again although daily trading volume is $3 billion.

July 30, 2018: Happy third birthday Ethereum

Major events in Ethereum’s timeline

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA): In March 2017, various blockchain start-ups, research groups, and Fortune 500 companies announced the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) with 30 founding members. By May, the nonprofit organization had 116 enterprise members—including ConsenSys, CME Group, Cornell University’s research group, Toyota Research Institute, Samsung SDS, Microsoft, Intel, J. P. Morgan etc. By July 2017, there were over 150 members in the alliance, including recent additions MasterCard, Cisco Systems, Sberbank, and Scotiabank.

The DAO event: In 2016, $50 million in Ether was stolen by an anonymous hacker which resulted in questions about the platform’s security. The event sparked a debate in the crypto-community about whether Ethereum should perform a contentious “hard fork” to reappropriate the affected funds. As a result of the dispute, the network split in two.  After the hard fork related to The DAO, Ethereum subsequently forked twice in the fourth quarter of 2016 to deal with other attacks. By the end of November 2016, Ethereum had increased its DDoS protection, de-bloated the blockchain, and thwarted further spam attacks by hackers.

Also, read: Ethereum Volume See a Sudden Jump SurpassingBitcoin

What lies ahead, Ethereum to face stiff competition

If what is to be believed and heard The following seems to be the roadmap for Vitalik Buterin and his team of developers with a deadline of its 4th and 5th Birthday

• Strengthening the Byzantium phase of Ethereum’s roadmap; the first part of the Metropolis stage before moving to the next part.
• Updating and strengthening Plasma to negate slow down of transaction times, especially during ICOs
• Development of Sharding  to make thing quicker than existing proof-of-work blockchains
• Moving on to Constantinople and introducing the Casper proof-of-stake upgrade which is currently under testing
• Casper will be in full swing by the time Ethereum upgrades to Serenity, the final milestone on Ethereum’s roadmap.

Currently, developers expect Sharding, Casper, and Plasma to bring the scalability of Ethereum to the next tier. These scaling solutions could be the elixir to elevate Ethereum to new heights and new potentials. The battle won’t be just of self-development, it will also include a race against time and Ethereum will have to take its competition head-on especially to the likes of competing cryptos such as EOS, often dubbed the ‘Ethereum killer’.

While things still to roll out, We wish Ethereum a happy 3rd Birthday!

Will Ethereum be the undisputed cryptocurrency and blockchain in years to come? Do let us know your views on the same.

Sunil is a serial entrepreneur and has been working in blockchain and cryptocurrency space for 2 years now. Previously he co-founded Govt. of India supported startup InThinks and is currently Chief Editor at Coingape and CEO at SquadX, a fintech startup. He has published more than 100 articles on cryptocurrency and blockchain and has assisted a number of ICO’s in their success. He has co-designed blockchain development industrial training and has hosted many interviews in past. Follow him on Twitter at @sharmasunil8114 and reach out to him at sunil (at) coingape.com

The presented content may include the personal opinion of the author and is subject to market condition. Do your market research before investing in cryptocurrencies. The author or the publication does not hold any responsibility for your personal financial loss.