Ethereum started as an idea from Vitalik Buterin, a 19-year-old programmer who published the Ethereum whitepaper on November 27, 2013. His plan was a blockchain that could run programs, not j
Ethereum started as an idea from Vitalik Buterin, a 19-year-old programmer who published the Ethereum whitepaper on November 27, 2013. His plan was a blockchain that could run programs, not just record payments.
The network went live on July 30, 2015, and today secures about $300 billion in value.
Bitcoin proved that people could send money without a bank. But its scripting language was limited on purpose. Buterin wanted a general-purpose blockchain where developers could build any kind of application.
These applications run on smart contracts. A smart contract is code stored on a blockchain that runs on its own when set conditions are met. It works like a vending machine: put in the right input, and you get a fixed output, with no clerk in the middle.
Ethereum's design rests on three core pieces:
Ethereum's first release, called Frontier, went live on July 30, 2015. It created the genesis block, the very first block on the chain, and introduced the EVM. Frontier was built mainly for developers.
Homestead followed on March 14, 2016, at block 1,150,000. It was Ethereum's first planned hard fork. A hard fork is a rule change that every node must adopt to stay on the same chain.
In 2016, a project called The DAO used smart contracts to run a decentralized venture fund. Over a 28-day funding period, it raised about $150 million worth of ETH from more than 11,000 people.
In June 2016, an attacker used a flaw in The DAO's code to take about $50 million worth of ETH.
On July 20, 2016, at block 1,920,000, Ethereum ran a hard fork that moved the stolen funds into a recovery contract. Some users rejected the fork and kept running the original chain, which became Ethereum Classic (ETC).
For its first seven years, Ethereum used proof-of-work (PoW). Under PoW, miners compete with computing power to add new blocks. On September 15, 2022, Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake (PoS) in an upgrade called the Merge.
Under PoS, validators lock up, or stake, ETH to propose and check blocks. The Merge joined the original chain with the Beacon Chain, a separate PoS chain that had been running alongside it. It also made the "difficulty bomb" obsolete. That piece of code had been added in 2015 to push developers toward PoS.
Staking has grown steadily since. Bitwise reported a record 43.8 million ETH staked in Q3 2026, or 35.9% of supply, though the staking yield slipped to 2.63%.
About a year before the Merge, the London upgrade added EIP-1559, which burns part of every transaction fee. Burning removes ETH from circulation, which changed ETH's tokenomics by tying supply to network use.
Mainnet blocks carried a 60 million gas limit as of October 13, 2026, up from 30 million. The next upgrade, Glamsterdam, focuses on scaling the main chain, also called layer 1 (L1). It includes:
Glamsterdam went live on the Sepolia testnet on October 6, 2026. It is set for the Hoodi testnet on October 26, 2026, at 17:42:48 UTC. Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter said Hoodi is the final testnet before mainnet. The Ethereum Foundation says the mainnet date has not been decided, and the official roadmap lists only an unconfirmed fourth-quarter 2026 target.
A higher gas limit does not guarantee the same jump in real throughput. How many transactions fit in a block still depends on how much gas each one uses.
ETH opened at $2,446.67 on October 21, 2026, and rose to $2,459.92 by 7:21 a.m. ET. That is about 50% below its all-time high of $4,946.05, set on August 24, 2025.
ETH fell about 7% between October 4 and October 11, with an intraday low of $2,406.15 on October 8.
Ethereum began as a 2013 whitepaper and launched in 2015 as a blockchain that runs smart contracts. It has recovered from the DAO hack, split from Ethereum Classic, moved to proof-of-stake, and raised its mainnet gas limit from 30 million to 60 million. More than a third of all ETH is now staked. With Glamsterdam in its final testnet stage, Ethereum is preparing to move block building into the protocol and raise its gas limit target to 200 million.
