Today, July 30, 2021, is the sixth anniversary of Ethereum.
ETH celebrates its sixth anniversary
Block number 0 of blockchain Ethereum was mined on July 30, 2015, which is exactly six years ago. It all happened after the first big bullrun of BTC, which ended in December 2013, especially the closure of Mt. Gox due to bankruptcy.
The price of BTC fell to $ 180 in January 2015, after exceeding $ 1,100 between November and December 2013. 2015 was probably by far the worst year for the entire cryptocurrency sector.
At that time, there were very few other cryptocurrencies. In addition to BTC, which was born in 2009, there were Litecoin (2011), Ripple (2012), Dogecoin (2013), Stellar (2014) and other cryptocurrencies. At that time, cryptocurrencies were mostly only means of payment, ie. currencies used to conduct financial transactions.
ETH and smart contracts
Then ETH introduced innovation: smart contracts. Smart contracts have been talked about for a long time, but their cryptocurrency version was not formalized until white paper of Ethereum from 2013.
In fact, ETH was born as something new and innovative, basically as a platform for managing smart contracts rather than as a means of payment.
The white paper published by Vitalik Buterin in 2013 begins with a paragraph entitled “Next Generation Smart Contracts and a Decentralized Application Platform”.
In this document, Buterin calls BTC a transaction system, as do all the alternative crypto projects that existed at the time. While his vision was that it was a very different project, ie. not an alternative decentralized digital currency, but a decentralized digital platform for the management of smart contracts.
In Whitepaper, Buterin cited as examples Namecoin, Colored Coins, and Metacoins, and then defined ETH as follows:
“Ethereum’s intention is to create an alternative protocol for building decentralized applications, providing a different set of options that we think will be very useful for a large class of decentralized applications, with special emphasis on situations where rapid development, security for small and rarely used applications and the ability of different applications to communicate very effectively are important. Ethereum does this by creating an essentially final abstract base layer: a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language that allows anyone to write smart contracts and decentralized applications where they can create their own arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats and transition functions. ” .
Two years after the whitepaper was released, the first block of new blockchain was mined.
Shortly afterwards, ETH tokens began trading on the market at a price of around $ 2.8, which fell below $ 0.5 in the following months. Today, ETH is worth more than $ 2,400.
