Ethereum's Evolution: From Programmable Blockchain to Proof-of-Stake Consensus

The Ethereum network has undergone significant changes since its inception in 2013. Vitalik Buterin proposed a programmable blockchain, which was later funded through a 2014 crowdsale. The network launched its mainnet on July 30, 2015, with its Frontier release, allowing developers to write contracts and users to pay gas in ETH to execute transactions.

The DAO exploit in 2016 forced a difficult choice between changing the chain's history to recover funds or maintaining the original course. A hard fork produced the chain now called Ethereum, while the unforked chain continued as Ethereum Classic.

The network transitioned to proof-of-stake consensus with the Merge in 2022, joining the execution history to the Beacon Chain and ending mining. This change reduced the network's energy use but did not make mainnet transactions cheap, with scaling through layer 2 networks remaining a priority.