Five-Year Milestone! What accomplishments has the largest smart contract public chain "Ethereum" achieved in the past?

Ethereum 1.0 mainnet was officially launched on July 30, 2015. Not only does it hold the second position in market capitalization in the cryptocurrency market, but it has also quietly passed its fifth year. As the schedule for the transition to 2.0 approaches, this year is particularly special for Ethereum. Therefore, the foreign media CoinDesk has compiled the five-year journey of Ethereum into five charts.

1. The Peaceful Split

Almost a year after Ethereum's launch, a hacker attack split the Ethereum community in two.

On June 17, 2016, the autonomous organization on Ethereum known as "The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)" was hacked, resulting in a loss of about 3.7 million Ether. Ethereum developers decided to use a "hard fork" to restore the on-chain data to before the attack, rendering the stolen funds useless and restoring user funds.

Some in the community opposed this decision, arguing that it went against the irreversible nature of blockchain technology, and that on-chain transaction data and the integrity of all assets, including the stolen funds, should be preserved.

After the hard fork was enforced on July 20 of the same year, the Ethereum blockchain split into two, with some miners remaining on the old chain (Classic Chain), giving rise to Ethereum Classic.

2. CryptoKitties Craze

The first user-favored DApp was CryptoKitties, a virtual cat collecting game launched in November 2017. Its popularity was such that it was covered by the BBC and The New York Times. Rare tokenized virtual cats were valued as high as $200,000 at their peak.

The high volume of transactions led to severe network congestion on Ethereum, causing delays in transfers and, on January 10, 2018, setting a record for total daily transaction fees. The CryptoKitties frenzy highlighted the technical limitations of Ethereum.

3. Stress Testing Limits

Starting in 2017, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) began to expand massively. According to ICObench, over 80% of ICOs created their tokens and raised funds using Ethereum. When the ICO craze peaked in 2018, Ethereum raised over $7.8 billion for at least 1,000 projects.

The prosperity of ICOs indicates that there are still many applications of blockchain technology yet to be explored. Despite technical limitations, such as the aforementioned CryptoKitties DApp and the current popularity of decentralized finance (DeFi) projects dominating Ethereum's application landscape, a total of $4.3 billion is locked in various DeFi protocols to date.

4. DApp's Dominance

Ethereum has strived to become the "world computer" since 2015, developing the programming language Solidity and token standards ERC-20 and ERC-721. While other projects like Tron, EOS, and Tezos emerged, Ethereum remains the most popular public chain in terms of users and DApp quantity.

However, Ethereum has yet to realize its vision, as its infrastructure is insufficient to handle data requests from billions of global users. Due to technical limitations, Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin and developers have devised the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, which is expected to launch by early next year at the latest.

5. The Long Road to 2.0

The Ethereum 2.0 roadmap has undergone multiple iterations over the past five years. The mainnet was launched in July 2015 with plans to transition from the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a more energy-efficient Proof of Stake mechanism. Developers created the "difficulty bomb" to gradually increase mining difficulty, encouraging miners to transition slowly to the Proof of Stake mechanism.

However, as shown in the diagram, with the continuous delays of the difficulty bomb mechanism, the Ethereum 2.0 plan has been consistently postponed. Even the "Serenity" phase, originally scheduled to launch in July this year, has been delayed again to November, with uncertainties remaining.

Nevertheless, with the Medalla multi-client testnet going live on August 4, if it runs smoothly and undergoes comprehensive attack and defense testing without potential risks within three months, the official launch of the Ethereum 2.0 mainnet seems to be approaching.