Ethereum Evolution is a highly successful public blockchain by adoption, mindshare, and the number of developers working on Ethereum smart contracts and decentralized apps. Below is a short history of Ethereum, and some difficult periods in its history that it has managed to overcome.
Ethereum Evolution - 2013
Vitalik Buterin described Ethereum as a concept in a white paper in late 2013. This concept was developed by Dr Gavin Wood who published a technical yellow paper in April 2014. Since then, Ethereum Evolution software has been managed by a community of developers. A crowd sale took place in July and August 2014 to fund development, and Ethereum’s live blockchain was launched on 30 July 2015. You can see the very first block here: https://etherscan.io/block/0
Ethereum Evolution - Crowdsale
The development team of Ethereum Evolution was funded by an online sale of ETH tokens from July to August 2014 where people could buy ETH tokens by paying in Bitcoin. Early investors received 2,000 ETH per BTC, and this was gradually reduced to 1,337 ETH179 per BTC over the course of about a month, to encourage investors to invest early. Crowdsale participants sent bitcoins to a Bitcoin address and received an Ethereum wallet containing the number of ETH bought.
A little over 60m ETH was sold this way for more than 31,500 BTC, worth about US$18m at the time. An additional 20% (12m ETH) was created to fund development and the Ethereum Foundation for Ethereum Evolution.
Ethereum Evolution - Software Release codenames
Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity are friendly names for versions of the core Ethereum software, a little like Apple’s OS X version names such as Mavericks, El Capitan, and Sierra.
The DAO Hack
There is a concept called a ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation’. The idea is that an automated company or entity runs itself according to some encoded charter, without human intervention or management. It just does what it says it will do. A common example is a self-driving taxi that makes money by providing a taxi service and can go and get itself repaired or filled with petrol. Call me old fashioned, but this sounds fantastical to me without a human ultimately responsible for the actions of the taxi.
In 2016, a team from a German company called Slock-it pivoted from their business model of making smart locks that can be opened using tokens on blockchains and built a sort of automated venture capital (VC) company as a smart contract deployed on Ethereum’s public blockchain. They called it ‘The DAO’ (note the capitalization). This is a confusing name, it is like calling a bank ‘The Bank’ or a company ‘The Company’.
In Ethereum Evolution, the idea behind The DAO is that it would be a cryptocurrency fund for funding startups. Investors who want to invest in relevant startups would send money (in the form of ETH) to the smart contract, and the smart contract would issue them DAO tokens in proportion to their investment.
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