Ethereum's Evolution: From Programmable Blockchain to Proof-of-Stake Consensus
The story of Ethereum (ETH) began with a simple question: what if developers could deploy programs that run on a shared blockchain?
Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders, proposed a programmable blockchain in 2013, which led to the circulation of the Ethereum whitepaper.
The idea was a general-purpose blockchain with smart contracts, rather than a chain built around one payment function.
In 2014, a crowdsale funded development, and in 2015, the Ethereum mainnet launched with its Frontier release, allowing developers to write contracts and users to pay gas in ETH to execute transactions.
The DAO, an early Ethereum-based investment vehicle, suffered an exploit in 2016, leading to a hard fork that produced the chain now called Ethereum, while the unforked chain continued as Ethereum Classic.
In 2020, a separate proof-of-stake Beacon Chain began, and on September 15, 2022, the Merge joined Ethereum's existing execution history to that proof-of-stake consensus, ending mining on Ethereum.
Today, a validator stakes ETH to participate in proof-of-stake and proposes or attests to blocks, while users submit transactions, pay gas, and contracts can change state according to their code.