Author: @c_luyishisi (Fourteenth Jun)

In 2011, a 17-year-old Russian-Canadian teenager initially wrote articles for a website called "Bitcoin Weekly," receiving 5 bitcoins for each article. "It was my first real job, and the hourly wage was about $1.30," he later recalled.

Those 5 bitcoins are worth $600,000 today—a multi-hundred-thousand-fold increase that speaks to the incredible growth of the entire cryptocurrency era.

Even more astonishingly, Ethereum, created by the young Vitalik Buterin, has grown at a pace comparable to Bitcoin itself: today, with a market capitalization of over $400 billion, it handles over $5 trillion in annual transactions.

Read this article to look back at the decade since the launch of Ethereum's genesis block, a decade of rapid growth for the blockchain industry. Learn how he went from the vision of a young writer earning $1.30 an hour to the infrastructure that transformed the digital world. In this process, what changes in the underlying technology led to shifts in the superstructure?

Prehistoric Story—Bitcoin is the Beginning of a Dream

From Bitcoin Inspiration to Ethereum Creator

In 2013, the soaring price of Bitcoin ignited Vitalik's boundless imagination, but it also exposed his own limitations. As a contributor to Bitcoin Magazine, he delved deeper into the Bitcoin community, only to discover how difficult it would be to expand the blockchain ecosystem beyond simple financial products if this revolutionary financial system shifted to a new goal of programmability.

Furthermore, in the blockchain world at the time, smart contracts were still a very vague concept, without definition, examples, or direction.

In the initial conception, contracts only supported fixed-function scripts—such as simple multi-signature and time-locked contracts, or two-party contracts like Mastercoin, where participants A and B invested capital and then distributed profits according to a preset formula. These scripting languages were far from Turing-complete and could only describe the terms of the relationship between two parties. They were far from being a true "world computer," let alone intelligent.

Vitalik once argued to Bitcoin Core developers that the Bitcoin platform should have a more comprehensive programming language for people to develop programs. However, the Bitcoin community's conservatism and minimalist philosophy fundamentally conflicted with Vitalik's vision of a more universal and open blockchain. Moreover, all the scaling solutions on the market at the time were patchwork, and no one dared to propose a completely redesigned solution.

So he made a decision that now seems to have truly changed the world: to develop a new platform.

The path forward was clear, but the path backward was unclear. Although it was a new platform, the specifics of its design and implementation posed a major challenge.

A turning point came in late 2013, while Vitalik was taking a long walk in San Francisco. He suddenly realized that contracts could be generalized—if they were smart contracts, they could be fully fledged accounts, capable of holding, sending, and receiving assets, and even maintaining some permanent state. So why not go a step further and break away from the scripts that describe fixed relationships and design a virtual machine capable of executing arbitrary computations?

The original Ethereum design even adopted a register-based architecture (rather than the stack-based architecture that would later be used) and incorporated a novel fee mechanism: with each computational step, the contract's balance would decrease slightly, and if the contract ran out of funds, execution would cease. This was the prototype of the early "pays by contract" model, which later evolved into the "sender pays" and gas systems we are familiar with.

In late 2013, Vitalik wrote the Ethereum white paper, which, at its core, defined the goal: to create a general-purpose decentralized computing platform on which 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 bridge from this idealistic vision to achievable technical specifications. The arrival of Gavin Wood at this time was a crucial turning point. In 2014, Gavin Wood wrote the famous "Ethereum Yellow Paper," the formal technical specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine's operational processes.

While the white paper outlines the "why" and "what," the yellow paper precisely defines the "how." The combination of these two documents helped elevate Ethereum from concept to reality. Key Technical Decisions and Evolution in Berlin From 2014 to 2015, Berlin became a spiritual sanctuary for Ethereum. Vitalik frequently made pilgrimages to Berlin's Bitcoin Kiez district, and the restaurant and bar Room 77 became a gathering place for the early crypto community. Just 1.5 kilometers from Room 77, in the offices at Waldemarstraße 37A, the Ethereum core team toiled through the night, writing code. During this period, the Ethereum protocol underwent countless technical iterations: from a register-based architecture to a stack-based architecture, from a "pays by contract" model to a "sender pays" gas system, and from asynchronous internal transaction calls to synchronous execution. Many of these decisions had far-reaching consequences.

For example, the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) standardized on a 256-bit integer model, initially designed to accommodate the common bit widths of hash functions and encryption algorithms and to mitigate overflow risks. While this may have seemed overly conservative at the time, it naturally accommodates the complex, high-precision mathematical operations (such as fixed-point operations and rounding in multiplication and division) found in DeFi, and also mitigates precision issues in languages like JavaScript and float.

Furthermore, if a transaction runs out of gas, the entire execution is rolled back rather than partially completed. This design eliminates the entire attack surface of "partial execution attacks" and has become the cornerstone of the security of all subsequent smart contracts. This design also has a stronger economic impetus. On the one hand, technically, it's impossible to predict the gas required for contract execution before execution. On the other hand, the potential for failure and loss gives senders greater incentive to manage costs and behavior, avoiding blindly sending transactions.

Everyone's technical creativity has brought many unexpected surprises. For example, Vitalik initially envisioned an asynchronous contract call model, but Gavin Wood naturally adopted synchronous calls during implementation based on engineering and semantic consistency considerations. This seemingly unintentional deviation laid the key technical foundation for the subsequent composability of DeFi—enabling one contract to synchronously return execution results when calling another, creating the predictability and atomicity of "money legos."

It's important to note that Ethereum DeFi applications are highly interdependent and none of them operate as a single ecosystem. For example, lending protocols use DAI/USDC as collateral, while stablecoin mint modules use Chainlink as an oracle. Many market-making protocols provide leverage based on Aave and Compound. Synchronous calls are crucial to this interconnectedness, but they also have their pros and cons. Because synchronous call performance is more difficult to scale, Ethereum has subsequently had to adopt more complex scaling strategies (see the L2 section below for details).

In addition, the well-known Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining algorithm has undergone multiple iterations, from Vitalik's Dagger algorithm, to Dagger-Hashimoto, developed in collaboration with Thaddeus Dryja, to Ethash, which emphasizes ASIC resistance. Throughout this process, various approaches have been explored, including adaptive difficulty, memory-hard structures, and random access circuits.

Of course, some of these difficulties have unexpected solutions, but they also become subsequent technical debt. In 2025, when Vitalik... When proposing replacing the EVM with RISC-V, he admitted: "Ethereum's history has often been characterized by a failure to maintain simplicity (sometimes due to my own decisions), which has led to excessive development expenditures, various security risks, and often in pursuit of benefits that have proven to be illusory."

Historic Moment: July 30, 2015

Vitalik still remembers July 30, 2015, in his Berlin office: "A bunch of developers were gathered, and we were all watching the block count on the Ethereum testnet reach 1,028,201, marking the automatic launch of the Ethereum mainnet. I still remember us all sitting there waiting, and then it finally hit that number, and about half a minute later, Ethereum blocks began to be generated." At that moment, Ethereum had fewer than 100 developers, and the entire ecosystem was little more than a technological experiment. The first decentralized Twitter app, EtherTweet, had an interface as rudimentary as the Wright Brothers' airplane, and every tweet incurred exorbitant on-chain fees. Smart contracts were still the playthings of a few geeks, while DeFi, NFTs, and Layer 2 existed only in the imaginations of white papers. Searching that address on Google Maps today still reveals the annotation "Ethereum Network Launch (July 30, 2015)" and a 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 10th anniversary, as of the first half of 2025:

• In the first quarter of 2025, a record 6.1 million wallets participated in on-chain governance voting.

• Ethereum adds approximately 350,000 new wallets per week, driven by users joining through Layer 2s.

• As of March 2025, the number of active Ethereum wallets reached 127 million, a 22% year-over-year increase.

• It leads the stablecoin market by a wide margin, with a market capitalization of $82.1 billion, accounting for 60.0% of the total market capitalization.

• The TVL (total value locked) across various DeFi protocols exceeds $45 billion.

• Uniswap's daily trading volume exceeds $2.1 billion, and lending platforms like Aave and Compound hold a combined total of over $13 billion in locked assets.

• Over the past 12 months, Ethereum has recorded over 28,400 GitHub commits in its core repository.

• The number of active developers contributing to Ethereum-related projects currently stands at over 5,200.

There are many more figures I won't list here; the point is that this "fringe experiment" with fewer than 100 developers has grown into the largest development platform and ecosystem in the Web3 world.

In the past decade, Ethereum has grown from a handful of daily transactions to processing $5 trillion in value annually; from exorbitant fees of several dollars per transaction to minuscule costs of less than a penny on Layer 2; from PoW mining, which consumes as much electricity as a small country, to PoS, which consumes less than a building; from the humble EtherTweet demo app to a mature DeFi ecosystem where 80% of transactions are denominated in ETH—each and every one of these figures bears the weight of the tireless efforts of countless developers and the trust and confidence of users. When the US SEC approved nine ETH spot ETFs, with first-day trading volume exceeding $1 billion, this once "fringe cryptocurrency experiment" has become one of the world's largest assets, exerting an increasingly profound influence at the heart of the mainstream financial system.

However, the journey from a young man in a Berlin office to the architect of a new generation of global financial infrastructure has not been smooth sailing. Over the past decade, Ethereum has endured the pain of technological upgrades, the trials of hacker attacks, the test of market cycles, and countless crucial decisions that hinged on its survival. Every crisis is a reinvention, every upgrade a transformation, and every controversy a growth. It's these pivotal moments of ups and downs that have shaped the Ethereum we know today.

Let's return to those defining moments and reexamine how this legend was forged amidst the storm.

A Ten-Year Journey - Key Milestones and Evolutionary Logic

2015-2017: From Genesis to Hard Forks and the ICO Frenzy

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

Early Ethereum felt more like an experimental technology showcase 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 volatile gas price made every interaction a gamble, sometimes taking an hour to get to the blockchain. Even more frustrating for developers was the immaturity of the Solidity language, with the compiler frequently encountering strange bugs (such as variable shadowing, stack overflows, and incorrect jump logic). The security of smart contracts often relied on the developer's personal experience.

Despite the technological immaturity, the Ethereum community displayed unprecedented idealism and enthusiasm. Weekly developer meetings were always packed with programmers from around the world, discussing how smart contracts could reshape the world—from autonomous organizations to prediction markets, from identity systems to supply chain management—and it seemed like they were truly flourishing everywhere. This optimism was laced with an almost unwavering belief: code is law, mathematics is truth, and decentralization is freedom.

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

Image Source | The Dao White Paper: https://github.com/the-dao/whitepaper

At this moment, a major crisis quietly arrived. On June 17th, a hacker exploited a reentrancy attack vulnerability in The DAO smart contract and successfully stole 3.6 million ETH (approximately 5% of the total Ethereum supply at the time).

The core of this attack was a classic reentrancy vulnerability in the splitDAO function of The DAO smart contract—a classic attack pattern that later became part of smart contract security textbooks.

When a user calls the splitDAO function, the contract executes the following steps: first, it sends the user a reward via the withdrawRewardFor function, and then updates the user's balance. The problem is that the withdrawRewardFor function ultimately uses the underlying call() method to send ETH to the recipient using the call.value() method (the use of such a low-level transfer mechanism is also a problem). Then, when the recipient (the attacker) contract receives the ETH, its fallback function is triggered, and the splitDAO function is immediately called again. This creates a reentrancy attack. Because the first call has not yet completed (the balance has not yet been updated), the attacker can repeatedly withdraw funds based on the same balance.

The attacker deployed two identical malicious contracts, using recursive calls to perform up to 29 withdrawals. Each withdrawal was calculated based on the same original balance, ultimately successfully transferring tens of millions of dollars in ETH to the child DAO they controlled. Ironically, this vulnerability was discovered and warned by multiple developers before the attack, but due to the belief that "code is law," no one considered suspending the contract. This plunged the entire Ethereum community into an unprecedented philosophical crisis. On one side were technical purists who insisted on the sacrosanct immutability of the blockchain, arguing that the attack, while morally wrong, was technically "legal" because the attacker was simply acting according to the contract's code logic. On the other side were pragmatists who believed that protecting investor interests and preserving the Ethereum ecosystem were more important than abstract principles. In contrast, Gavin Wood (co-founder, former CTO, and author of the Yellow Paper) responded in a public interview: "The blockchain is supposed to be immutable, and the code on the chain should be the actual control logic." But he also admitted, "If I saw someone being robbed on the street, I would be willing to stop the robbery and return the stolen goods." Vitalik Buterin later wrote in a blog post: "I spent sleepless nights ruminating over what true decentralization means. If we can modify history at will, what's the difference between Ethereum and traditional databases? But if we watch attackers take away the community's funds, how can we face those who trusted us?" After intense community debate, Vitalik ultimately opted for a hard fork (the story of the split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic). He later reflected, "We learned a harsh truth: absolute decentralization is a beautiful ideal, but in the real world, we must balance pure principles with human needs." This lesson has been reflected in every subsequent network upgrade: technical decisions must serve the overall interests of the community, not abstract ideologies. If the DAO incident marked Ethereum's coming-of-age ceremony, then the ICO boom of 2017 marked its adolescence. That year, over 50,000 ERC-20 token contracts were deployed on the Ethereum network, raising over $4 billion. Blockchain began to rewrite the rules of the game for traditional venture capital.

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

Historical data, analyzed using gas consumption, shows that a large number of contracts were generated in 2017-2018 (the yellow area in the red box on the left of the image). ERC20 transfers also became popular, and the type of on-chain assets evolved from the native currency (ETH) to a variety of ecological applications.

CryptoKitties, a digital cat game, took up 15% of the network's transaction capacity in just a few days, causing gas fees to soar from a few cents to tens of dollars and transaction confirmation times to extend from minutes to hours. This precedent, after the London 2021 upgrade, allowed the second phase of the Cats NFT craze (the gray area in the red box on the right side of the image) to remain relatively stable.

Each cycle of ecological explosions has led to a growing demand for on-chain space, making people realize how far away the processing capacity of 15 transactions per second is from the grand vision of a "global computer."

2018-2022: Forging the Future in Silence—From Technological Accumulation to Ecosystem Explosion

The Ongoing Technological Revolution (2018-2022)

When the ICO bubble burst in 2018 and speculators fled, the number of Ethereum developers continued to grow. It was during this largely forgotten period of silence that Ethereum completed a series of key technical upgrades, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent ecosystem explosion.

Upgrades occurred almost annually, with the Byzantium fork, the Constantinople fork, and the Istanbul fork all following. Many of these changes were largely invisible to users, bringing more fundamental changes. As we can see, by reducing the block reward from 5 ETH to 3 ETH, Ethereum began to strike a balance between inflation and security. These upgrades introduced a variety of underlying support capabilities for Layer 2 expansion, including pre-programmed zero-knowledge proof technologies like zk-SNARKs. Furthermore, the introduction of the CREATE2 opcode enabled deterministic address creation for multi-chain contracts.

As mentioned above, the real solution to alleviate the perceived transaction congestion problem for users is EIP-1559 in the 2021 London upgrade. This proposal addresses the shortcomings of the traditional "blind auction" mechanism through a dual mechanism of base fees and priority fees. Before EIP-1559, users had to guess the appropriate gas price. Bidding too low might result in a long wait for transactions to be included, while bidding too high would result in a significant waste of funds. Worse still, when the network is congested, users tend to panic and dramatically increase their bids, leading to spiraling fees and a "price war."

But EIP-1559 doesn't mean congestion is eliminated, because EIP-1559 addresses the "price discovery" problem, not the "capacity" problem.

The actual throughput of the Ethereum mainnet hasn't increased significantly as a result—it still only processes about 15 transactions per second. It simply makes prices more predictable by automatically increasing the base fee during congestion, until some users abandon the network due to excessive prices. It's like building a better toll booth—making queues more orderly and tolls more transparent—but without increasing the number of lanes on the highway itself.

True "road expansion" still requires Layer 2 solutions—which is why rollup technologies like Arbitrum and Optimism, as well as blobs like EIP-4844, are at the core of Ethereum's scaling roadmap.

This period also saw 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 trials of various technical approaches, including Casper FFG and Casper CBC, before finally settling on its direction with the successful launch of the Beacon Chain.

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

Image Source | Ethereum Staking Data:  https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking

To date, Ethereum has over 1.1 million validators and 3.6 million ETH locked in staking, representing approximately 29.17% of the total supply. This scale of staking participation provides Ethereum with unprecedented economic security. The cost of a 51% attack would be millions of ETH, an extremely high cost. Furthermore, the diverse nature of the staking community makes the overall security even more difficult to compromise. However, consensus doesn't have to remain static for long. Ethereum's successful transition to POS without sacrificing decentralization is largely due to its years of experience with Proof-of-Work, resulting in a highly dispersed token distribution. This inherent advantage isn't matched by any other POS chain. On the other hand, the existing consensus still presents limitations in terms of user experience. For example, Ethereum currently uses a delayed finality mechanism, requiring multiple epochs to confirm block finality. This is inconvenient for cross-chain and rollup settlement scenarios. Therefore, the Single Slot Finality (SSF) solution is being developed to reduce finality to a single slot (12 seconds). There's also the idea of Beam Chain, which offers several potential directions for future consensus design. For example, it allows validators to participate in consensus without owning the full state, enhancing the feasibility of lightweight clients. Combined with designs like EIP-4844 and Danksharding, the Beam model can support more flexible data access paths and accelerate the decoupling of validators and executors.

Thus, the path to consensus remains timeless, constantly adapting to higher-level decentralization requirements and user experience.

The DeFi/NFT Summer Ecosystem Miracle (2020-2023)

After years of infrastructure upgrades, when the technological foundation is sufficiently solid, innovation will mushroom.

In the summer of 2020, Compound's liquidity mining sparked the DeFi revolution, but it was the technological foundation built over the previous three years that truly made this revolution possible. Uniswap's automated market maker model, Aave's flash loans, and Curve's optimized stablecoin trading—each innovation is built on Ethereum's increasingly mature smart contract infrastructure. Furthermore, Ethereum's leading DeFi protocols are highly interdependent, forming a true "money Lego" ecosystem. This composability is the result of Ethereum's years of technological development.

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

This chart shows the transaction trends of DeFi applications on various EVM-based chains. While some EVMs are not part of Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem, it shows that from the most disruptive period in 2021, when several major players competed, to the present day, it is difficult to tell how many different projects are emerging on each chain, each of which is fulfilling the diverse financial needs of each chain.

On the other hand, from CryptoPunks to Bored Ape Yacht Club, NFTs have not only redefined digital ownership but also allowed Ethereum to find a new value anchor in the digital art and culture sector. The rise of OpenSea and Blur demonstrates Ethereum's immense potential as cultural infrastructure, all underpinned by its comprehensive token standards.

It's worth noting that even now, the CryptoPunks project (shown in gray on the left side of the image below) still holds a significant share of the NFT market. It even predates NFT standards, with its contracts already incorporating trading market functionality. Its full-chain architecture allows for direct on-chain interaction and transaction processing without the need for a front-end.

In the stablecoin sector, following the DeFi Summer of 2021, USDC, USDT, and DAI have dominated the stablecoin market, with over $130 billion in capital.

Looking back over the past decade, from the initial ERC-20 to ERC-721 and ERC-1155, and to the emerging standards currently under exploration, such as ERC-3525 and ERC-3475, Ethereum has built a digital framework capable of representing virtually all types of real-world assets.

These five standards constitute a complete expression system for everything from simple currencies to complex financial contracts. There are many more standards that have not yet been finalized but are already being gradually implemented in various applications, and there is room for continued development.

This is precisely where innovation comes from. A more open market built on protocol layers creates more room for ingenuity. EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) don't inherently create products, but rather serve as Ethereum's improvement proposal mechanism, allowing protocol participants to reach consensus at various levels. Whether it's contract standards, client implementations, or user experience-related process optimizations, each improvement proposal is historically recorded, undergoes technical review, and ultimately is adopted or rejected by the network.

2023-2025: Differentiation in the Rollup Centric Era

Ethereum's Path to Scaling: Layer 2

This journey has already come a long way. Layer 2 has become a vital component of the Ethereum ecosystem, accounting for 85% of all transactions, 31% of transaction volume, and 3-4 times the number of active addresses of the Ethereum mainnet. Behind this booming expansion success lies a more complex process of comprehensive restructuring of technology and business models.

As mentioned earlier, Ethereum's TPS was previously 15/s. What is the actual TPS of the entire Ethereum ecosystem now?

Image Source | L2beat: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

Vitalik once performed a comprehensive calculation using blobs: Using EIP-4844, we now have 3 blobs per slot, with a data bandwidth of 384 kB per slot, which works out to 32 kB per second. Each transaction requires approximately 150 bytes on-chain, resulting in a rate of ~210 tx/sec.

Compared to the actual numbers on L2beat, the difference is quite similar. A tenfold improvement in just a few years is truly impressive.

How do we understand the EIP-4844 blob here? There's an interesting website that explains the difference.

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

First, let's look at the left side. This is the Ethereum block production process. Each person in the diagram represents a transaction interacting with an application. These transactions are then included in different blocks based on the gas price, and are then packaged and shipped.

Then, let's look at Arbitrum One, one of Ethereum's Layer 2 platforms, on the right. Similarly, each person interacting with an application leaves a note on the counter. After a certain period of time, a postman arrives to collect all transactions, forming a blob. This postman then goes to the Ethereum mainnet on the left and submits it to a specific carriage.

In this way, the blob avoids unnecessary data being written to the Ethereum mainnet for extended periods of time, serving only for verification and a short period of time. This reduces Layer 2 transaction fees by 90%.

Image Source | L2beat: https://l2beat.com/scaling/costs

Objectively speaking, however, market sentiment is mixed, as L2 has not generated a proportional increase in Ethereum revenue. EIP-1559 introduced a deflationary mechanism through ETH burning, which was welcomed by the community, as deflation often represents an increase in value for vested groups.

However, today, with 85% of transactions migrating to Layer 2, MEV revenue is naturally being captured by rollups at various layers, pushing the mainnet back into inflation. Inflation itself can actually impact the security of Ethereum staking (currencies that depreciate over the long term naturally tend to be held for the long term).

However, in my opinion, Ethereum is proactively forgoing profits in exchange for ecosystem prosperity. Rather than adopting the traditional "enterprise" approach of maintaining profits by raising fees or restricting competition, it has chosen to reposition itself as a highly decentralized, permissionless Layer 2 issuance protocol.

This strategy has led to a clash of opinions. Regardless, we can say that we are currently witnessing a new model of value capture—ETH no longer relies solely on burning supply to capture value, but rather on leveraging powerful network effects to gain value within an ever-expanding ecosystem.

Going a step further, compared to earlier scaling roadmaps, we're now shifting from the early vision of "homogeneous sharding" to the reality of a "heterogeneous ecosystem." The 2016 sharding vision envisioned the creation of multiple identical copies of the EVM, processed by different nodes. Today's L2s practically realize this vision, but with a fundamental difference: each "shard" is created by different participants and adheres to different standards, forming a de facto heterogeneous network.

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

However, this heterogeneity also presents 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, has more dispersed interests, and has a tighter timeframe.

This L2 exploration continues, but regardless of the outcome, Ethereum's "self-sacrifice" has become one of the most unique experiments in blockchain history—a technical system voluntarily relinquishing power for its own ideals, a protocol forgoing monopoly profits for the sake of ecological diversity.

This is perhaps the best reflection of Vitalik's statement that "the technical project and the social project are inherently intertwined."

2015-2025: A Decade-Long Journey into Account Abstraction

The vision of account abstraction is even older than Ethereum itself. This is the dream of "making technology invisible"—just as we don't need to understand the underlying Unix system to use our iPhones today, blockchain users shouldn't be forced to become cryptography experts.

Imagine this scenario: you need to memorize a string of 12 random words to open your bank account. If you forget, your deposits are permanently lost, and if you leak them, your assets are completely stolen. This sounds like a science fiction bug, but it's the reality blockchain users have experienced for a decade.

This seemingly "pure" self-sovereign design actually stems from a technical compromise in Ethereum's early days: EOAs (external accounts) coupled ownership and signing rights to the same private key. To put it more bluntly, your "ID card" also doubles as your "bank password." Exposing your private key means you're left with nothing.

This design stems from Ethereum's transaction structure—standard transactions lack a "From" field. Instead, the sender's address is decrypted from the VRS parameter (i.e., the user signature).

Account abstraction aims to address this "technical necessity" that hinders user experience.

In November 2015, just four months after the Ethereum mainnet launch, Vitalik proposed EIP-101, the first account abstraction proposal. The vision at the time was radical yet simple: turn all accounts into smart contracts, making code, not private keys, the sole controller of accounts.

But ideals are ambitious, but reality is harsh. Ethereum carries a heavier historical burden than any other new blockchain—millions of existing EOA accounts, hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, and a vast and complex ecosystem. Any radical change could have disastrous consequences.

Thus began a long technological journey:

• EIP-101 in 2015 envisioned a blueprint for contractual accounts.

• EIP-859 in 2018 attempted to implement contract wallets at deployment time.

• EIP-3074 in 2021 attempted to add smart contract functionality to EOA.

• ERC-4337, proposed in 2021 and launched in 2023, achieved account abstraction without modifying the protocol layer.

• EIP-7702, based on EIP-3074, proposed in 2024, ultimately achieved mainnet deployment in the Pectra upgrade in 2025.

This decade of exploration has been like changing the engine on a mid-flight aircraft—every step must be extremely cautious, ensuring both safety and upgradeability. EIP-7702 brings more than just a change to the technical architecture; it also lays the foundation for an improved user experience. Let's take a look at the upcoming future: Passkey Technology: No longer need to remember 12 mnemonics; simply use Touch ID or Face ID to securely access your digital assets. Gmail Retrieval: If you forget how to access your wallet, you can use ZK Email technology to send a zero-knowledge proof to your Gmail account, restoring control without compromising privacy. It sounds like magic, but it's real technology. Complex DeFi Operations with One Click: For heavy on-chain users, you can bundle multiple transactions together—from borrowing and lending to trading and staking—with a single click, significantly reducing wait time and the risk of failure. Of course, this requires a reliable wallet to structure these transactions for you.

Looking back at the Pectra upgrade, we once again see Ethereum's continued deliberation and commitment to its future direction. The L2 grand strategy has entered a period of stable execution. While Ethereum's roadmap has evolved in some details, its core goal remains the same: building a secure, decentralized, highly scalable, and easily verifiable green blockchain. The introduction of various user experience proposals represents Ethereum's unwavering pursuit of enhancing its competitiveness while maintaining decentralization—even in the face of fierce competition from a new generation of public blockchains vying for supremacy, it remains committed to becoming the ideal world computer.

The Starry Sky—Towards Openness and Fairness

On July 30, 2024, Ethereum's ninth anniversary, Vitalik posed a profound question of the times at EDCON: "The past decade of Ethereum has been a decade of theoretical focus. By 2024, we have the technology. Over the next 10 years, we must truly shift our focus, not just considering L1 but also truly considering our actual impact on the world." "

Ten years ago, a 19-year-old boy was writing code with his teammates in a Berlin office, dreaming of creating a "world computer." Ten years later, his dream has been partially realized: Ethereum now carries trillions of dollars in value, connects tens of millions of users worldwide, and supports an unprecedented decentralized financial ecosystem.

However, like all great innovations, Ethereum's story is far from over. From the trauma of the DAO Hack to the revelry of DeFi Summer, from the triumph of The Merge to the fragmentation of Layer 2, to the ups and downs of its decade-long journey toward account abstraction, every crisis has been the beginning of a new life, and every controversy has driven the process of evolution.

Ten years later, Ethereum remains that unfinished world computer, a myth still in progress. Starting from nothing in the early days, he abandoned the focus on efficiency and allowed Ethereum to operate as a protocol, becoming a resilient system.

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

Disclaimer:

This article is for reference only. It represents the author's views and does not necessarily reflect the position of OKX. It is not intended to provide (i) investment advice or recommendations; (ii) an offer or solicitation to buy, sell, or hold digital assets; or (iii) financial, accounting, legal, or tax advice. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of this information. Holding digital assets (including stablecoins and NFTs) carries a high level of risk and may fluctuate significantly. You should carefully consider whether trading or holding digital assets is appropriate for you based on your financial situation. Please consult your legal, tax, or investment professionals regarding your specific circumstances. You are solely responsible for understanding and complying with applicable local laws and regulations.