The major choice of survival and demise in the ten years since the Ethereum genesis

Author: Shijiu Jun

Preface

In 2011, a 17-year-old Russian-Canadian boy initially wrote articles for a website called "Bitcoin Weekly," earning 5 bitcoins for each article. "This was my first real job, with an hourly wage of about $1.30," he later recalled.

Those 5 bitcoins are worth $600,000 today—a rise of hundreds of thousands of times that witnesses the crazy growth of the entire cryptocurrency era.

Even more shocking is that the boy, Vitalik Buterin, created Ethereum, which has developed at a pace comparable to Bitcoin itself: now with a market value of over $400 billion, it supports more than $5 trillion in transactions annually.

Follow this article as we look back at the ten years since the launch of Ethereum's genesis block, a decade of fiery development in the blockchain industry, to see how he transformed from a $1.30-an-hour writing youth into the creator of an infrastructure that changes the operational logic of the entire digital world, and what foundational technological changes occurred during this process that led to the migration of the superstructure.

1. Prehistoric Story—Bitcoin is the Beginning of a Dream

1.1 From Bitcoin Inspiration to Ethereum Creator

In 2013, the soaring price of Bitcoin ignited Vitalik's limitless imagination, but it also made him aware of Bitcoin's limitations. As a writer for "Bitcoin Magazine," he delved deeper into the Bitcoin community but found that this revolutionary financial system faced immense difficulties in transitioning to new programmable goals, expanding the blockchain system beyond mere financial products.

Moreover, at that time, the concept of smart contracts was still extremely vague—there were no definitions, no samples, and certainly no direction.

In the initial vision, contracts were merely scripts supporting some fixed functions—such as simple multi-signatures, time locks, or bilateral contracts like Mastercoin, where participants A and B both invested funds and then distributed profits according to a preset formula. This scripting language was far from Turing complete; it could only describe the terms of the relationship between the two parties and could hardly be called a true "world computer," let alone intelligent.

Vitalik once argued to Bitcoin core developers that the Bitcoin platform should have a more complete programming language for developers to create programs. However, the conservatism and minimalist philosophy of the Bitcoin community fundamentally conflicted with Vitalik's vision of a more universal and open blockchain. At that time, various scaling solutions in the market were merely patching things up, and no one dared to propose a completely redesigned solution.

Thus, he made a decision that, in hindsight, truly changed the world: to develop a new platform.

With a forward-looking decision made, the path backward was still unclear. Although it was a new platform, how to design and implement it specifically was a big question.

A turning point came at the end of 2013 during a long walk in San Francisco. He suddenly realized that contracts could be generalized—if it were an intelligent contract, it could itself be a fully mature account, capable of holding, sending, and receiving assets, and even maintaining permanent storage of some state. Why not go further, breaking the script that describes fixed relationships, to design a virtual machine capable of executing arbitrary computations?

The initial design of Ethereum even adopted a register-based architecture (rather than the later stack-based architecture) and incorporated a novel fee mechanism: with each computational step executed, the contract's balance would decrease slightly, and if the contract funds were exhausted, execution would stop. This was the prototype of the early "contract payment" model, which later evolved into the familiar "sender pays" and Gas system.

At the end of 2013, Vitalik wrote the Ethereum white paper, which defined the goal—to create a general-purpose decentralized computing platform where anyone could deploy and run decentralized applications, not fixed-function scripts, but a truly Turing-complete computing environment.

However, there was still a huge gap to cross from the ideal vision to achievable technical specifications. At this time, Gavin Wood's involvement became a key turning point. In 2014, Gavin Wood wrote the famous "Ethereum Yellow Paper," which is the formal technical specification for the operation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

1.2 Key Technical Decisions and Evolution in Berlin

From 2014 to 2015, Berlin became the spiritual home of Ethereum. Vitalik often "pilgrimed" in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, with Room 77 becoming a gathering place for the early crypto community. In the Waldemarstraße 37 A office, just 1.5 kilometers from Room 77, the core team of Ethereum was coding day and night.

During this phase, the Ethereum protocol underwent countless technical iterations: transitioning from a register-based architecture to a stack-based architecture, evolving from the "contract payment" model to the "sender pays" Gas system, and changing from asynchronous internal transaction calls to synchronous execution—many decisions had far-reaching impacts.

For example, the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) unified the 256-bit integer model, initially to accommodate the common bit width of hash functions and cryptographic algorithms while avoiding overflow risks in design. Although it seemed overly conservative at the time, it naturally adapted to the complex high-precision mathematical operations in DeFi (such as fixed-point arithmetic, multiplication, and division rounding), also avoiding precision issues found in JS/float-like languages.

Additionally, if a transaction runs out of Gas, the entire execution will roll back rather than partially complete. This design eliminated the entire attack surface of "partial execution attacks," becoming the cornerstone of all smart contract security later on. Moreover, this design had economic incentives; on one hand, technically, the Gas required for contract execution could not be predicted beforehand, and on the other hand, since there would be losses due to failures, senders were more incentivized to control costs and behavior, avoiding blind transaction submissions.

The technical creativity of everyone brought many unexpected surprises. For instance, Vitalik initially envisioned an asynchronous contract calling model, but Gavin Wood, considering engineering and semantic consistency during implementation, naturally adopted synchronous calls. This seemingly unintentional shift laid the crucial technical foundation for later DeFi composability—allowing one contract to call another and synchronously return execution results, creating the predictability and atomicity of "money Legos."

It is worth noting that Ethereum's DeFi applications are highly interdependent and do not exist in isolation. For example, lending protocols use DAI/USDC as collateral, while stablecoin minting modules call Chainlink for oracles, and many market-making protocols leverage Aave and Compound for leverage. This series of interactions owes much to synchronous calls, which, while beneficial, also have downsides. Due to the performance challenges of synchronous calls, Ethereum had to choose more complex scaling solutions later on (see the L2 section below for details).

Additionally, the well-known PoW mining algorithm underwent multiple iterations, from the Dagger algorithm proposed by Vitalik to Dagger-Hashimoto developed in collaboration with Thaddeus Dryja, and then to Ethash, which emphasized ASIC resistance. Throughout these processes, various directions such as adaptive difficulty, memory-hard structures, and random access circuits were also explored.

Of course, many difficulties also brought unexpected joys, which naturally became subsequent technical debts. In 2025, when Vitalik proposed replacing the EVM with RISC-V, he admitted: "Ethereum has often failed to maintain simplicity throughout its history (sometimes due to my own decisions), leading to excessive development expenditures and various security risks, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven to be illusory."

1.3 A Historic Moment: July 30, 2015

On July 30, 2015, Vitalik still remembers the scene in the Berlin office that day: "Many developers gathered together, and we were all watching the block count on the Ethereum testnet reach 1028201, as this marked the automatic launch of the Ethereum mainnet. I still remember we were all sitting there waiting, and then it finally reached that number, and about half a minute later, Ethereum blocks started being generated."

At that moment, there were fewer than 100 developers in total on Ethereum, and the entire ecosystem was merely a technical experiment. The first decentralized Twitter application, "EtherTweet," had an interface as rudimentary as "the Wright brothers' plane," and each tweet required a high on-chain fee. Smart contracts were still just toys for a few geeks, and DeFi, NFTs, and Layer 2 existed only in the imagination of white papers.

Now, if you search for that address on Google Maps, you can still see it marked as "Ethereum Network Launch (30/07/2015)" along with a group photo of the early core members of Ethereum—one of the most important photos in crypto history.

On July 30, 2025, when Ethereum celebrates its tenth anniversary, as of the first half of 2025:

• In Q1 2025, a record 6.1 million wallets participated in on-chain governance voting.
• Ethereum adds approximately 350,000 new wallets weekly, thanks to users joining through Layer 2.
• As of March 2025, the number of active Ethereum wallets reached 127 million, a year-on-year increase of 22%.
• Leading the stablecoin market with a market cap of $82.1 billion, accounting for 60.0% of the total market cap.
• The total locked value (TVL) of various DeFi protocols exceeded $45 billion.
• Uniswap's daily trading volume surpassed $2.1 billion, and lending platforms like Aave and Compound held over $13 billion in locked assets.
• In the past 12 months, Ethereum recorded over 28,400 GitHub commits in its core repository.
• The number of active developers contributing to Ethereum-related projects currently exceeds 5,200.

There are many more data points that the author will not list here, but the point is that this "marginal experiment" that once had fewer than 100 developers has grown into the largest development platform and ecosystem in the Web 3 world.

Over the past decade, from a few transactions a day to processing $5 trillion in value annually, from transaction fees of several dollars to less than a cent on Layer 2, from PoW mining consuming as much electricity as a small country to PoS mechanisms consuming even less than a building, from the rudimentary EtherTweet demo application to a mature DeFi ecosystem priced at 80% in ETH—every number carries the relentless efforts of countless developers and the trust choices of users. And when the SEC approved nine ETH spot ETFs, with first-day trading volume exceeding $1 billion, this once "marginal cryptocurrency experiment" has become a large-scale asset ranking among the top globally, causing increasingly profound impacts at the core of the mainstream financial system.

However, the road from the boy in the Berlin office to the creator of a new generation of global financial infrastructure has not been smooth. Over the past decade, Ethereum has experienced the growing pains of technological upgrades, the trials of hacker attacks, the baptism of market cycles, and countless critical decisions concerning life and death. Every crisis has been a rebirth, every upgrade a transformation, and every controversy a growth opportunity. It is these pivotal moments of ups and downs that have shaped the Ethereum we see today.

Let us return to those decisive moments and re-examine how this legend was forged in the storm.

2. A Decade Journey—Key Nodes and Evolution Logic

2.1 2015-2017: From Genesis to Hard Fork and the ICO Craze

The launch of the Ethereum mainnet that summer marked the beginning of the smart contract era.

Early Ethereum resembled an experimental technology showcase rather than a truly usable product. Most of the applications running on the network were simple demo applications—such as EtherTweet (a decentralized Twitter clone), WeiFund (a crowdfunding platform), and various rudimentary voting contracts.

The instability of Gas prices made every interaction feel like a gamble, sometimes taking an hour to get on-chain. Even more frustrating for developers was that the Solidity language was still immature, with the compiler frequently encountering strange bugs (such as variable shadowing, stack overflow, and jump logic errors), and the security of smart contracts often relied on the personal experience of developers.

Despite the technological immaturity, the Ethereum community exhibited unprecedented idealistic enthusiasm. Weekly developer meetings were always packed with programmers from around the world discussing how to reconstruct the entire world with smart contracts—from autonomous organizations to prediction markets, from identity systems to supply chain management, which now seems to be flourishing everywhere. Moreover, this optimistic sentiment was mixed with an almost fervent belief: code is law, mathematics is truth, and decentralization is freedom.

Carrying this sentiment, in May 2016, a project called "The DAO" launched on Ethereum, hailed as "the largest crowdfunding experiment in human history." In just 28 days, it raised $150 million worth of ETH (accounting for 14%-15% of the entire network), becoming the largest venture capital fund in the world at that time.

Image source | The DAO white paper: https://github.com/the-dao/whitepaper

At this time, a huge crisis quietly approached. On June 17, a hacker exploited a reentrancy attack vulnerability in The DAO smart contract to successfully steal 3.6 million ETH (about 5% of the total Ethereum supply at that time).

The core of this attack lay in the design of the splitDAO function in The DAO smart contract, which had a typical reentrancy vulnerability—a classic attack pattern that would later be included in smart contract security textbooks.

When a user called the split DAO function, the contract would execute the following steps: first, it would send rewards to the user via the withdrawRewardFor function, and only then would it update the user's balance. The problem was that the withdrawRewardFor function ultimately used the low-level call() method to send ETH to the receiver (using such a low-level transfer mechanism was also a problem). Then, when the receiver (the attacker) received the ETH, its fallback function was triggered, immediately calling the splitDAO function again. This created a reentrancy attack, as the first call had not yet completed (the balance had not yet been updated), allowing the attacker to repeatedly withdraw funds based on the same balance.

The attacker deployed two identical malicious contracts, achieving up to 29 recursive withdrawals. Each withdrawal was based on the same original balance, ultimately successfully transferring tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH to their controlled sub-DAO. Ironically, this vulnerability had been discovered and warned about by several developers before the attack occurred, but under the belief of "code is law," no one thought the contract's operation should be paused.

This plunged the entire Ethereum community into an unprecedented philosophical crisis. On one side were the technical purists, who insisted that the immutability of the blockchain was sacred and inviolable, believing that while the attack was morally wrong, it was "legitimate" technically, as the attacker was merely acting according to the contract's code logic. On the other side were the pragmatists, who believed that protecting investors' interests and maintaining the Ethereum ecosystem were more important than abstract principles.

In response, Gavin Wood (one of the co-founders, former CTO, and author of the Yellow Paper) stated in a public interview: "The blockchain should be immutable, and the code on-chain should be the true controlling logic." But he also admitted, "If I saw someone being robbed on the street, I would be willing to step in to stop the robbery and return the stolen goods."

Vitalik Buterin later wrote in his blog: "I spent the night sleepless, repeatedly thinking about what true decentralization is. If we can modify history at will, how is Ethereum different from a traditional database? But if we watch the attacker take away the community's funds, how do we face those who trust us?"

After intense community debate, Vitalik ultimately chose a hard fork (which is the story of the split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic). He later reflected: "We learned a cruel truth—absolute decentralization is a beautiful ideal, but in the real world, we must find a balance between pure principles and human needs." This lesson has been reflected in every subsequent network upgrade: technical decisions must serve the overall interests of the community, rather than abstract ideologies.

If the DAO incident was Ethereum's coming-of-age ceremony, then the ICO craze of 2017 was its adolescence. That year, over 50,000 ERC-20 token contracts were deployed on the Ethereum network, raising over $4 billion, and blockchain began rewriting the rules of traditional venture capital.

Image source | dune: https://dune.com/queries/2391035/3922140

Historical data shows that, aided by Gas consumption analysis, a large number of contracts were generated in 2017-2018 (the yellow part in the left red box of the image), and ERC-20 transfers became popular, transforming on-chain assets from native coins (ETH) into a variety of ecological applications.

Additionally, a digital cat game called CryptoKitties occupied 15% of the network's transaction capacity within just a few days, causing Gas fees to soar from a few cents to tens of dollars, extending transaction confirmation times from minutes to hours. This experience served as a lesson, leading to the London upgrade completed in 2021, allowing the subsequent NFT craze of cats to proceed without turmoil.

The ecological explosions that erupted in each cycle continuously raised the demand for on-chain space, making people deeply aware of how far the processing capacity of 15 transactions per second was from the grand vision of a "global computer."

2.2 2018-2022: Forging the Future in Silence—From Technical Accumulation to Ecological Explosion

Ongoing Technological Revolution (2018-2022)

When the ICO bubble burst in 2018 and speculators exited the scene, the number of Ethereum developers did not decrease but rather increased. It was during this forgotten period of silence that Ethereum completed a series of key technical upgrades, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent ecological explosion.

Almost annual upgrades followed, with the Byzantium fork, Constantinople fork, and Istanbul fork successively emerging. Many changes were relatively unnoticed by users, bringing more underlying transformations. For instance, by reducing the block reward from 5 ETH to 3 ETH, Ethereum began to seek a balance between inflation and security; these upgrades also introduced various underlying support energies for Layer 2 scaling, including the pre-embedding of zero-knowledge proof technologies like zk-SNARKs. The introduction of the CREATE2 opcode allowed multi-chain contracts to have deterministic address creation capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, the real solution to alleviating user experience issues related to transaction congestion was EIP-1559 in the London upgrade of 2021. This proposal addressed the flaws of the traditional "blind auction" mechanism through a dual mechanism of base fee and priority fee. Before EIP-1559, users had to guess the appropriate Gas price—bidding too low could result in transactions not being packaged for a long time, while bidding too high would waste a lot of funds. Worse still, during network congestion, users often panicked and significantly raised their bids, leading to a spiraling increase in fees and creating a "price war."

However, it was not that Ethereum was no longer congested after EIP-1559, as EIP-1559 addressed the "price discovery" issue rather than the "capacity" issue.

The actual throughput of the Ethereum mainnet did not significantly increase as a result—still only able to process about 15 transactions per second. It merely made prices more predictable during congestion due to the automatic increase of the base fee, until some users abandoned usage due to high prices. It was like building a better toll booth, making the queue more orderly and the fees more transparent, but the number of lanes on the highway itself did not increase.

The real "road expansion" still relies on Layer 2 solutions—this is why rollup technologies like Arbitrum and Optimism, as well as EIP-4844's blobs, have become central to Ethereum's scaling roadmap.

During this period, there was also a fundamental technological shift: the evolution of Ethereum's consensus mechanism. Initially, Ethereum inherited Bitcoin's PoW model, but the PoS solution explored since 2015 underwent repeated validations of various technical routes, such as Casper FFG and Casper CBC, until the successful launch of the beacon chain finally determined the direction.

On December 1, 2020, 520,000 ETH were staked within just one month, and by 2022, the successful launch of The Merge reduced Ethereum's energy consumption by 99.95%, not only meeting the environmental requirements of regulators and investment institutions but also laying the groundwork for future sharding expansion and further optimization of the beacon chain, truly achieving the transition from "mining equals security" to "staking equals governance."

However, the gap between ideals and reality was vividly reflected here—the complexity of the dual-chain architecture, high learning costs, and institutional access barriers.

Image source | Ethereum staking data: https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking

To date, Ethereum has over 1.1 million validators, with 3.6 million ETH locked for staking, accounting for about 29.17% of the total supply. Such a scale of staking participation provides unprecedented economic security for Ethereum—if an attacker wants to launch a 51% attack, the cost would be in the millions of ETH, making it extremely costly, and the diversity of staking participants makes the overall security even harder to shake.

However, consensus does not have to remain unchanged for the long term. The successful transition of Ethereum to PoS without losing its degree of decentralization is largely due to its years of operation under PoW, resulting in a highly decentralized token distribution that is not something any PoS chain can easily match. On the other hand, the existing consensus still brings limitations to user experience.

For instance, Ethereum still operates on a finality delay mechanism, requiring multiple epochs to confirm block finality, which is inconvenient in cross-chain and rollup settlement scenarios. Therefore, future Single Slot Finality (SSF) solutions are working to compress finality to a single slot (12 seconds). There is also the concept of Beam Chain, which provides several possible directions for future consensus design, such as allowing validators to participate in consensus without owning the full state, enhancing the feasibility of lightweight clients. Coupled with designs like EIP-4844 and Danksharding, the Beam model can support more flexible data access paths, accelerating the decoupling of validators and executors.

Thus, the road to consensus remains ever-evolving, continuously adapting to higher levels of decentralization requirements and matching user experience.

The Ecological Miracle of DeFi/NFT Summer (2020-2023)

After years of infrastructure iterations, when the technological foundation is strong enough, innovation will emerge like bamboo shoots after a rain.

In the summer of 2020, Compound's liquidity mining served as a singular point, igniting the fuse of DeFi, but what truly made this revolution possible was the technological foundation accumulated over the previous three years. Uniswap's automated market maker model, Aave's flash loans, Curve's stablecoin trading optimization—each innovation was built on Ethereum's increasingly mature smart contract infrastructure. Moreover, the interdependence of leading DeFi protocols formed a true "money Lego" ecosystem, and this composability is the crystallization of Ethereum's years of technical accumulation.

Image source | dune: https://dune.com/queries/4688388/7800121

This chart shows the trend of DeFi applications' transactions across various EVM-structured chains. Although some EVMs are not Ethereum or its L2 ecosystem, it illustrates how, from the most disruptive period in 2021 to now, the number of colors (projects) across various chains has become indistinguishable, each blooming to meet diverse financial needs on-chain.

On the other hand, from CryptoPunks to Bored Ape Yacht Club, NFTs not only redefined digital ownership but also allowed Ethereum to find new value anchors in the fields of digital art and culture. The rise of OpenSea/Blur proves Ethereum's immense potential as a cultural infrastructure, and the foundation of all this is Ethereum's well-established token standard system.

It is worth mentioning that even now, the single project CryptoPunks (shown in the left side of the image, gray part) still occupies a significant share of the entire NFT market. It even appeared before the NFT standard, with the contract itself built-in with trading market functionality, allowing full-chain architecture to interact directly with the chain for order transactions without needing a frontend.

In the stablecoin sector, after the DeFi Summer of 2021, over $130 billion in funds were divided among USDC, USDT, DAI, and others.

Looking back over the past decade, from the initial ERC-20 to ERC-721, ERC-1155, and the emerging standards currently being explored like ERC-3525 and ERC-3475, Ethereum has built a digital framework capable of expressing almost all asset types in the real world.

These five major standards constitute a complete expression system from simple currencies to complex financial contracts, and there are many more that have not yet been finalized but are gradually being utilized in different applications, leaving room for continuous development.

This is the source of innovation—a more open protocol layer builds a market with more room for intelligent creativity. Through EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), it does not create products but serves as a mechanism for Ethereum's improvement proposals, allowing protocol participants to reach consensus at different levels, whether regarding contract standards, client implementations, or process optimizations related to user experience, ensuring that every improvement suggestion can be recorded in history, undergo technical review, and ultimately be adopted or rejected by the network.

2.3 2023-2025: Differentiation in the Rollup Centric Era

Ethereum's Scaling Path: Layer 2

This path has come a long way, and Layer 2 has now become an important part of the Ethereum ecosystem, accounting for 85% of transaction numbers, 31% of transaction volume, and active address counts reaching 3-4 times that of the Ethereum mainnet. Behind this prosperous scaling success lies a more complex process of comprehensive reconstruction of technology and business models.

As mentioned earlier, Ethereum's TPS was 15/s; so what is the actual TPS of the entire Ethereum ecosystem now?

Image source | L2 beat: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

Vitalik once calculated using blobs: with EIP-4844, we now have 3 blobs per slot, with each slot's data bandwidth at 384 kB, which is 32 kB per second, and each transaction on-chain requires about 150 bytes, resulting in approximately 210 tx/sec.

Comparing this with the actual numbers on L2 beat, it is indeed quite similar, achieving a tenfold increase in just a few years, which is quite powerful.

How can we understand the blobs of EIP-4844? There is an interesting website that illustrates the difference.

Image source | TxCity: https://txcity.io/v/eth-arbi

First, let’s look at the left side, which shows Ethereum's block generation process. Each person in the image represents a transaction interacting with an application, entering different blocks based on gas price to complete packaging.

Now, let’s look at the right side, which is one of Ethereum's Layer 2s, Arbitrum One. Here, each person also represents a transaction interacting with an application, but they leave a note at the counter. After a certain time, a postman comes to collect all the transactions, forming the current blob, and then this postman goes to the Ethereum mainnet on the left to submit it into a certain compartment.

In this way, blobs avoid unnecessary data being written into the Ethereum mainnet for long periods, only serving a purpose during validation and for a limited time, thus reducing Layer 2 fees by 90%.

However, it must be said that the market's views on this are mixed, as L2 has not brought proportional increases in revenue to Ethereum. Previously, EIP-1559 introduced a deflationary mechanism through burning ETH, which brought cheers from the community, as deflation often represents an increase in the value of the vested interests.

But today, with 85% of transactions moving to L2, MEV revenues are naturally intercepted by various rollups, causing the mainnet to fall back into an inflationary state. Inflation itself can affect the security of Ethereum staking (a currency that depreciates over the long term tends to be held for a long time).

However, in the author's view, Ethereum's active choice to sacrifice profits for ecological prosperity does not adopt the traditional approach of "enterprises"—maintaining profits through increased fees or limiting competition, but instead chooses to give benefits, repositioning itself as a highly decentralized, permissionless L2 issuance protocol.

This strategy has led to various viewpoints colliding. Regardless, it can be said that we are witnessing a new value capture model—ETH no longer relies on a burning mechanism to control supply to simply obtain value, but rather acquires value assessment through powerful network effects in an ever-expanding ecosystem.

Furthermore, compared to the early scaling roadmap, it is now shifting from the early vision of "homogeneous sharding" to the reality of "heterogeneous ecosystems." The sharding concept from 2016 was to create multiple identical EVM replicas processed by different nodes; today’s L2 has practically realized this vision but brought a fundamental difference—each "shard" is created by different participants, following different standards, forming a de facto heterogeneous network.

The traditional "one-chain governance" model has given way to a "multi-chain federation," where each L2 has its own governance mechanism, economic model, and community culture. Base can focus on providing a seamless experience for Coinbase users, Arbitrum can pursue maximum EVM compatibility, not to mention unique experiences like ZkEVM—this diversity is impossible to achieve under a single chain architecture.

However, this heterogeneity also brings new challenges. How can using Ethereum feel like using a single ecosystem rather than 34 different blockchains? This is a more complex coordination challenge than The Merge, as it involves more participants, more dispersed interests, and a tighter time window.

The exploration of L2 continues, but regardless of the outcome, Ethereum's "self-sacrifice" has become one of the most unique experiments in blockchain history—a technical system actively relinquishing power for its ideals, a protocol sacrificing monopolistic profits for ecological diversity.

This may be the best embodiment of Vitalik's statement: "The technical project and the social project are inherently intertwined."

2.4 2015-2025: A Decade Journey of Account Abstraction

The vision of account abstraction is even older than Ethereum itself. It is a dream about "making technology invisible"—just as we do not need to understand the underlying Unix system when using an iPhone, blockchain users should not be forced to become cryptography experts.

Imagine a scenario where you need to remember a string of 12 random words to open your bank account; if you forget, you can never retrieve your deposits, and if leaked, your assets will be entirely stolen. This sounds like a bug in a sci-fi novel, but it has been the real experience of blockchain users for the past decade.

This seemingly "pure" design of autonomy actually stems from a technical compromise in Ethereum's early days: EOA (Externally Owned Accounts) couples ownership and signing authority under the same private key. To put it more plainly, your "ID card" is also your "bank password," and exposing the private key means opening the door to losing everything.

The root of this design comes from Ethereum's transaction structure—standard transactions do not have a "From" field but instead reverse-engineer the sender's address through VRS parameters (i.e., user signatures).

Account abstraction aims to solve this "technical necessity" that binds user experience.

In November 2015, just four months after the launch of the Ethereum mainnet, Vitalik proposed EIP-101—the first account abstraction proposal. The vision at that time was radical yet simple: to turn all accounts into smart contracts, making code rather than private keys the sole controller of accounts.

However, ideals are often beautiful, while reality is stark. Ethereum carries a heavier historical burden than any new chain—millions of existing EOA accounts, assets worth billions of dollars, and a vast and complex ecosystem. Any radical change could have catastrophic consequences.

Thus began a long technological expedition:

• The EIP-101 of 2015 envisioned the blueprint for contract-based accounts.
• The EIP-859 of 2018 attempted to implement contract wallets at deployment.
• The EIP-3074 of 2021 sought to add smart contract functionality to EOAs.
• The ERC-4337 proposed in 2021 achieved account abstraction in 2023 without changing the protocol layer.
• The EIP-7702 proposed based on EIP-3074 was ultimately deployed on the mainnet in the 2025 Pectra upgrade.

This decade of exploration has been like changing engines on a flying airplane—ensuring safety while achieving upgrades, with each step requiring extreme caution. The EIP-7702 brings not only a change in technical architecture but also a foundational improvement in user experience. Let us look forward to the upcoming future:

Passkey Technology: You no longer need to remember 12 mnemonic words; you can securely access your digital assets using Touch ID or Face ID.

Gmail Recovery: When you forget how to access your wallet, you can send a zero-knowledge proof to your Gmail using ZK Email technology to regain control of your wallet without revealing any privacy. This sounds like magic, but it is indeed real technology.

One-Click Complex DeFi Operations: For heavy on-chain users, multiple transactions can be bundled together for execution—from lending to trading to staking in a complex sequence of operations, completed with one click, significantly reducing waiting times and failure risks. Of course, this requires a reliable wallet to construct such transactions for you.

Looking back at the Pectra upgrade, we once again see Ethereum's thoughts and persistence regarding future directions. The L2 grand strategy has entered a stable execution phase, and while there are changes in the details of Ethereum's roadmap, the core goal remains consistent: to build a secure, decentralized, highly scalable, and easily verifiable green blockchain. The introduction of various user experience proposals represents Ethereum's relentless exploration to enhance competitiveness while ensuring decentralization—even in the face of fierce competition from new generation public chains, it strives to become the ideal world computer.

3. Stars and Seas—Moving Towards Openness and Fairness

On July 30, 2024, the ninth anniversary of Ethereum, Vitalik posed a profound question of the era at EDCON: "The past ten years of Ethereum have been a decade focused on theory, and by 2024, we have this technology. In the next ten years, we really must change our focus, not only considering L1 but truly thinking about what impact we are actually having on the world."

Ten years ago, a 19-year-old boy was coding with his teammates in a Berlin office, dreaming of creating a "world computer." Ten years later, his dream has partially come true: today's Ethereum carries trillions of dollars in value transfer, connecting tens of millions of users worldwide and supporting an unprecedented decentralized financial ecosystem.

However, like all great innovations, the story of Ethereum is far from over.

From the trauma of the DAO Hack to the celebration of DeFi Summer, from the victory of The Merge to the differentiation of Layer 2, and the ups and downs of the decade-long journey of account abstraction, every crisis is a new beginning, and every controversy drives the process of evolution.

A decade has passed, and Ethereum remains that unfinished world computer, still a myth in progress. Early on, it gave up efficiency thinking, allowing Ethereum to operate as a protocol, becoming a resilient system.

It carries humanity's collective imagination for a more open, fair, and autonomous digital future. And this may be its greatest value.