The 10th Anniversary of the Ethereum Genesis Block: The World Computer Myth Continues

Author: @c_luyishisi (Fourteenth Jun)

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

The 5 bitcoins are worth $600,000 today - the increase of more than 100,000 times witnessed the crazy growth of the entire cryptocurrency era.

What is even more shocking is that the Ethereum created by this teenager Vitalik Buterin is no less developed than Bitcoin itself: now with a market value of more than 400 billion US dollars, it carries more than 5 trillion US dollars in transactions each year. Follow this article as we look back at the decade since the launch of Ethereum's genesis block, a decade that marked the blockchain industry's meteoric rise. We'll explore 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, we'll explore how changes in the underlying technology led to shifts in the superstructure. A Prehistoric Story: Bitcoin Is the Beginning of a Dream From Bitcoin Inspiration to Ethereum's Creator In 2013, the surge in Bitcoin's price ignited Vitalik's 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 challenging it would be for this revolutionary financial system to shift to a new goal of programmability and expand beyond simply providing financial products.

Moreover, in the blockchain world at that time, smart contracts were still just an extremely vague concept, with no definition, no samples, and no direction.

In the original conception, contracts only supported some fixed-function scripts - such as simple multi-signatures, time locks, or two-party contracts like Mastercoin, which allowed participants A and B to invest funds and then distribute the proceeds according to a preset formula. This scripting language is not Turing complete at all, and can only describe the terms of the relationship between the two parties. It is far from being a true "world computer", let alone intelligence.

Vitalik once advocated to the core developers of Bitcoin that the Bitcoin platform should have a more complete programming language for people to develop programs. However, the conservatism and minimalist philosophy of the Bitcoin community fundamentally conflicted with Vitalik's vision of a more universal and open blockchain. Moreover, various expansion plans in the market were being patched up at the time, 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. While the path forward was clear, 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 themselves be fully fledged accounts, capable of holding, sending, and receiving assets, and even maintaining permanent state. So why not go a step further and break away from the scripts that described 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 later emerged) 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 "contract pays" model, which later evolved into the familiar "sender pays" and gas system. 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. Rather than fixed-function scripts, it would be a truly Turing-complete computing environment. However, there was still a significant gap to bridge between this idealistic vision and achievable technical specifications. The arrival of Gavin Wood at this time was a crucial turning point. In 2014, Gavin Wood authored the famous "Ethereum Yellow Paper," the formal technical specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine's operational processes. The white paper outlines the "why" and "what," while the yellow paper precisely defines the "how." The combination of these two documents has taken Ethereum from concept to reality. Key Technical Decisions and Evolution in Berlin From 2014 to 2015, Berlin became a spiritual sanctuary for Ethereum. Vitalik often made pilgrimages to Berlin's Bitcoin Kiez district, and the Room 77 bar and restaurant became a gathering place for the early crypto community. In the office at Waldemarstraße 37A, only 1.5 kilometers away from Room 77, the core team of Ethereum was writing code all night long.

During this stage, the Ethereum protocol has undergone countless technical iterations: from a register-based architecture to a stack-based architecture, from a "pay-by-contract" model to a "sender-pays" gas system, from asynchronous internal transaction calls to synchronous execution, many decisions have far-reaching impacts.

For example, the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) unified the 256-bit integer model, which was originally designed to adapt to the common bit widths of hash functions and encryption algorithms, and to avoid overflow risks in design. Although it seemed overly conservative at the time, it was naturally adapted to the complex high-precision mathematical operations in DeFi (such as fixed-point, multiplication and division rounding), and also avoided the precision problems in JS/float-like languages. 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 is also driven by economic incentives. On the one hand, technically, the gas required for contract execution is unpredictable before execution. On the other hand, because of the potential for failure and loss, senders are more incentivized to control costs and behavior, avoiding blindly sending transactions. Everyone's technical creativity has brought many unexpected surprises. For example, Vitalik originally 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 a 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). Furthermore, 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, and finally 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 the difficulties have unexpected benefits, and naturally become subsequent technical debts. In 2025, when Vitalik proposed to replace EVM with RISC-V, he said frankly: "Ethereum has often failed to keep it simple in history (sometimes because of my own decisions), which has led to our excessive development expenditures and various security risks, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven to be illusory."

Historic moment: July 30, 2015 

If you search for that address on Google Maps now, you can still see the "Ethereum Network Launch (30/07/2015)" marked there, as well as a group photo of the early core members of Ethereum at that time - that is one of the most important photos in the history of encryption.

On July 30, 2025, when Ethereum celebrated its tenth 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 about 350,000 new wallets every week, thanks to users joining through Layer 2s.

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

• It is far ahead in the stablecoin market, with a market value of $82.1 billion, accounting for 60.0% of the total market value.

• The TVL (total locked value) of various Defi protocols exceeds $45 billion.

• Uniswap's daily trading volume exceeds $2.1 billion, and lending platforms such as Aave and Compound hold a total of more than $13 billion in locked assets.

• In the past 12 months, Ethereum has recorded more than 28,400 GitHub commits in the 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 I want to make here is that this "fringe experiment," once involving fewer than 100 developers, has grown into the largest development platform and ecosystem in the Web3 world. In the past decade, it has grown from a handful of transactions per day to processing $5 trillion in value annually; from exorbitant fees of several dollars per transaction to a tiny cost of less than a cent 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 of these figures bears the weight of the tireless efforts of countless developers and the trust of users. By the time the US SEC approved nine ETH spot ETFs, with first-day trading volume exceeding $1 billion, this once-fringe cryptocurrency experiment had 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 creator of a new generation of global financial infrastructure was not without its challenges. Over the past decade, Ethereum has weathered the pain of technological upgrades, the trials of hacker attacks, the test of market cycles, and countless crucial decisions that threatened its survival. Every crisis was a reinvention, every upgrade a transformation, and every controversy a growth. It was these pivotal moments that shaped the Ethereum we know today. Let us return to those defining moments and reexamine how this legend was forged amidst these storms.

  Ten-Year Journey—Key Milestones and Evolutionary Logic

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

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

  Early Ethereum was more of 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, and sometimes transactions could remain unconnected for an hour. What is even more troubling for developers is that the Solidity language is still extremely immature, and the compiler often has strange bugs (such as variable shadowing, stack overflow, jump logic errors), and the security of smart contracts often depends on the personal experience of developers.

  Despite the immaturity of the technology, the Ethereum community has shown unprecedented idealistic enthusiasm. Weekly developer meetings are always packed with programmers from all over the world, who discuss how to reconstruct the entire world with smart contracts - from autonomous organizations to prediction markets, from identity systems to supply chain management, and now it seems that it is really blooming everywhere. And this optimism is mixed with an almost strong belief: code is law, mathematics is truth, and decentralization is freedom.

  With this emotion, 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 (accounting for 14%-15% of the entire network), becoming the world's largest venture capital fund at the time.

  

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

  At this time, a huge crisis quietly arrived. On June 17, a hacker exploited the reentrancy attack vulnerability in The DAO smart contract and successfully stole 3.6 million ETH (about 5% of the total supply of Ethereum at the time). The core of this attack lies in a classic reentrancy vulnerability in the splitDAO function design within The DAO smart contract—a classic attack pattern later incorporated into textbooks on smart contract security. 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 lies in the fact 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 problematic). Subsequently, when the recipient (the attacker) contract receives the ETH, its fallback function is triggered, immediately calling the splitDAO function again. This creates a reentrancy vulnerability. Because the first call has not yet completed (the balance has not yet been updated), the attacker can repeatedly withdraw funds from the same balance. The attacker deployed two identical malicious contracts, using recursive calls to achieve up to 29 repeated withdrawals. Each withdrawal was calculated based on the same original balance, and eventually tens of millions of dollars of ETH were successfully transferred to the sub-DAO they controlled. Ironically, this vulnerability was discovered and warned by multiple developers before the attack, but under the belief that "code is law", no one thought that the contract should be suspended. This has plunged the entire Ethereum community into an unprecedented philosophical crisis. On the one hand, there are technical purists who insist that the immutability of the blockchain is sacrosanct and believe that the attack, although morally wrong, is technically "legal" because the attacker is only acting according to the code logic of the contract. On the other hand, there are pragmatists who believe that protecting investor interests and maintaining the Ethereum ecosystem is more important than abstract principles.

  In contrast, Gavin Wood (one of the co-founders, former CTO, and author of the yellow paper) responded in a public interview: "The blockchain should not be tampered with, and the code on the chain should be the code that truly controls the logic." But he also admitted: "If I see someone being robbed on the street, I am willing to stand up to stop the robbery and return the stolen goods."

  Vitalik Buterin later wrote in his blog: "I stayed up all night, thinking over and over again about what true decentralization is. If we can modify history at will, what is the difference between Ethereum and traditional databases? But if we watch attackers take away community funds, how can we face those who trust us?"

  After fierce community debate, Vitalik finally chose a hard fork (this is the story of the split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic). He later reflected: "We have learned a cruel truth - absolute decentralization is a beautiful ideal, but in the real world, we must find a balance between pure principles and 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 was Ethereum's coming of age, then the ICO boom in 2017 was its adolescence. In that year, more than 50,000 ERC-20 token contracts were deployed on the Ethereum network, raising more than $4 billion, and blockchain began to rewrite the rules of the game for traditional venture capital.

  

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

  Through historical data, we can see that with the help of Gas consumption analysis, a large number of contracts were generated in 2017-2018 (the yellow part in the red box on the left side of the figure), and ERC20 Transfer also became popular. The type of on-chain assets has transformed from the native currency (ETH) to a variety of ecological applications.

  There is also a digital cat game called CryptoKitties, which took up 15% of the network's transaction capacity in just a few days, causing the gas fee to soar from a few cents to tens of dollars, and the transaction confirmation time to extend from a few minutes to a few hours. It is precisely this precedent that allowed the cat phase II NFT craze (the gray part in the red box on the right side of the picture) to remain calm after the London upgrade completed in 21 years.

  The demand for on-chain space continues to rise in each cycle of the ecosystem, which also makes people deeply aware of how far the processing capacity of 15 transactions per second is from the grand vision of "global computer".

  2018-2022: Casting the future in silence——From technological precipitation to ecological explosion

  Ongoing technological revolution (2018-2022)

  When the ICO bubble burst in 2018, speculators left the market one after another, but the number of Ethereum developers increased instead of decreasing. It was during this silent period forgotten by the outside world that Ethereum completed a series of key technical upgrades, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent ecological explosion.

  Almost once a year, Byzantium fork, Constantinople fork, Istanbul fork came out one after another. Many changes are actually not felt by users, and they bring more changes to the underlying layer. As can be seen, 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 for Layer 2 expansion, including pre-coding for 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 user-perceived transaction congestion 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 and priority fees. Before EIP-1559, users had to guess the appropriate gas price. Bidding too low could result in transactions being blocked for a long time, while bidding too high would result in significant waste of funds. To make matters worse, during periods of network congestion, users often panicked and drastically increased their bids, leading to spiraling fees and a "price war."

  But it doesn't mean that there will be no more congestion after EIP-1559, because EIP-1559 solves the problem of "price discovery" rather than "capacity".

  The actual throughput of the Ethereum mainnet has not been greatly improved as a result - it can still only process about 15 transactions per second. He just made the price more predictable by automatically increasing the basic fee when it is congested, until some users give up using it because the price is too high. This is like building a better toll booth, making the queue more orderly and the toll more transparent, but the number of lanes on the highway itself has not increased.

  The real "road expansion" still needs to rely on Layer 2 solutions - this is why rollup technologies such as Arbitrum and Optimism, as well as eip-4844's blob, have become the core of Ethereum's expansion roadmap.

  During this period, there was also a fundamental technological change: the evolution of Ethereum's consensus mechanism. Initially, Ethereum inherited Bitcoin's PoW model, but the PoS solution, which has been explored since 2015, has undergone repeated demonstrations of various technical routes such as Casper FFG and Casper CBC, and the direction was finally determined until the successful launch of the beacon chain.

  On December 1, 2020, 520,000 ETH were pledged in just one month. By the successful launch of The Merge in 2022, Ethereum's energy consumption will be reduced by 99.95%, which not only meets the environmental protection requirements of regulators and investment institutions, but also lays the foundation for future sharding expansion and further optimization of the beacon chain, truly realizing the transformation from "mining is security" to "staking is governance".

  

  Image source ｜ Ethereum staking data: https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking

  To date, Ethereum has more than 1.1 million validators and 3.6 million ETH locked for staking, accounting for about 29.17% of the total supply. Such a large scale of staking participation provides Ethereum with unprecedented economic security - if an attacker wants to launch a 51% attack, the cost will be millions of ETH, which is extremely expensive, and the staking participants are also diverse, making the overall security even more difficult to shake.

  However, consensus does not have to remain unchanged for a long time, because Ethereum successfully switched to POS without losing its degree of decentralization, a big factor is that it has been running POW for many years, so the token distribution is already very decentralized. This inherent advantage is not comparable to any POS chain. On the other hand, the existing consensus still brings limitations in user experience.

  For example, Ethereum is still a mechanism of finality delay, and it takes multiple epochs to confirm the finality of the block, which is inconvenient in cross-chain and rollup settlement scenarios. Therefore, there will be a Single Slot Finality (SSF) scheme in the future that is committed to compressing the finality to one slot (12 seconds). There's also the concept 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. Therefore, 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 technical foundation is sufficiently solid, innovation will mushroom.

  In the summer of 2020, Compound's liquidity mining, as a singularity, ignited the fuse of DeFi, but what really made this revolution possible was the technical foundation accumulated in the previous three years. Uniswap's automatic market maker model, Aave's flash loan, Curve's stablecoin transaction optimization - each innovation is built on Ethereum's increasingly mature smart contract infrastructure. Moreover, Ethereum's top DeFi protocols are more interdependent, forming a real "currency Lego" ecosystem. This composability is the result of Ethereum's years of technological accumulation.

  

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

  From this picture, you can see the transaction trend of Defi applications on various EVM architecture chains. Although some EVMs are not Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem, it can be seen from this that from the most subversive period in 21 years, when several major players competed for supremacy, to now, it is unclear how many colors (projects) are on each chain, and each of them blooms to meet the diverse financial needs on different chains.

  On the other hand, from CryptoPunks to Bored Ape Yacht Club, NFT not only redefined digital ownership, but also allowed Ethereum to find a new value anchor in the field of digital art and culture. The rise of OpenSea/Blur proves the huge potential of Ethereum as a cultural infrastructure, and the foundation of all this is Ethereum's perfect token standard system.

  It is worth mentioning that even now the CryptoPunks single project (as shown in the left side of the figure below, the gray part) still occupies a significant share of the entire NFT market. It even appeared before the NFT standard. The contract itself has built-in trading market functions and a full-chain architecture. It can even interact directly with the chain without the front end to complete pending orders.

  

  In terms of stablecoins, after the Defi Summer in 21 years, the scale of funds exceeded 130B, divided and ruled by USDC, USDT, DAI, etc.

  Looking back over the past decade, from the initial ERC-20 to ERC-721, ERC-1155, to the emerging standards such as ERC-3525 and ERC-3475 that are being explored, Ethereum has built a digital framework that can express almost all asset types in the real world.

  

  These five standards constitute a complete expression system from simple currency to complex financial contracts. There are many more standards that have not yet been finalized but have been gradually enabled in different applications, and there will be room for continued development.

  This is also the source of innovation. A market built on a more open protocol layer will have more room for ingenuity to play. With the help of EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal), it does not create products itself, but is a set of Ethereum improvement proposal mechanisms that allow protocol participants to reach consensus at different levels, whether it is contract standards, client implementation, or process optimization related to user experience, so that each improvement suggestion can be recorded in history, technically reviewed, and ultimately adopted or rejected by the network.

  2023-2025:Differentiation in the Rollup Centric Era

  Ethereum's Path to Scaling:Layer 2

  This path has come a long way. Currently, Layer 2 has become an important part of the Ethereum ecosystem, with the number of transactions accounting for 85% of the total, the transaction volume accounting for 31%, and the number of active addresses reaching 3-4 times that of the Ethereum main network. Behind this prosperous expansion success, there is a more complex process of comprehensive reconstruction of technology and business models.

  As mentioned earlier, Ethereum's TPS was 15/s before, so what is the actual TPS of the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole now? Vitalik once used Blob to make a comprehensive calculation: using EIP-4844, we now have 3 blobs per slot, and the data bandwidth of each slot is 384 kB, which is 32 kB per second. Each transaction requires about 150 bytes on the chain, so we get ~210 tx/sec.

  Compared with the actual numbers on L2beat, the difference is not much different. It is really powerful to achieve a dozen times improvement in just a few years.

  How to understand the Blob of EIP-4844 here? There is an interesting website where you can feel the difference.

  

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

  First, let's look at the left side. This is the block production process of Ethereum. Each person in the picture is a transaction that interacts with a certain application, and then enters different blocks according to the gas price to complete the packaging and departure. Then, let's look at Arbitrum One, one of Ethereum's Layer 2, on the right. Similarly, each person interacting with an application in the picture leaves a note on the counter. After a certain period of time, a postman will collect all the transactions, forming the current blob. This postman then walks to the Ethereum mainnet on the left to submit them and enter a certain carriage. In this way, Blob avoids writing unnecessary data to the Ethereum mainnet for a long time, and only plays a role in verification and a period of time, thereby reducing the transaction fees on Layer 2 by 90%.

  

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

  However, objectively speaking, the market's views on this are chaotic, because L2 has not brought the same proportion of revenue to Ethereum. EIP-1559 once brought a mechanism to achieve deflation by burning ETH, which brought cheers from the community, because deflation often represents the value increase of the vested group.

  But today, with 85% of transactions transferred to L2, MEV income is naturally intercepted by rollups at various levels, and the main network has fallen into inflation again. Inflation itself will actually affect the security of Ethereum staking (currencies that depreciate over a long period of time naturally tend to be held for a long time).

  But in my opinion, Ethereum has actively given up profits in exchange for ecological prosperity. It has not adopted the traditional "enterprise" approach of maintaining profits by raising fees or restricting competition. Instead, it has chosen to make concessions and reposition itself as a highly decentralized, permissionless L2 issuance protocol.

  This strategy brings about a collision of multiple views. In any case, it can be said that at present, we are witnessing a new value capture model - ETH no longer relies on the burning mechanism to control supply to simply obtain value, but obtains value assessment in the expanding ecosystem through a strong network effect. 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 Layer 2 (L2) effectively realizes 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 Layer 2 possessing 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 wouldn't be possible with 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? However, this is a more complex coordination challenge than The Merge because it involves more participants, more dispersed interests, and a more urgent time window.

  This L2 exploration is still ongoing, but no matter what the outcome, Ethereum's "self-sacrifice" has become one of the most unique experiments in the history of blockchain - a technical system actively cedes power for its own ideals, and a protocol gives up monopoly profits for the diversity of the ecosystem.

  This is perhaps the best embodiment of what Vitalik said, "The technical project and the social project are inherently intertwined."

  2015-2025: A decade-long journey of account abstraction

  The vision of account abstraction is even older than Ethereum itself. This is a dream about "making technology invisible" - just as we don't need to understand the underlying Unix system when using an iPhone today, blockchain users should not 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, you'll never be able to access your deposits, and if you leak them, your entire balance will be stolen. This sounds like a science fiction bug, but it's the real experience of blockchain users for a decade. This seemingly "pure" autonomy 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," and exposing your private key means you're completely exposed and losing everything. 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 the impact of this "technical compromise" on user experience.

  In November 2015, just four months after the launch of the Ethereum mainnet, Vitalik proposed EIP-101, the first account abstraction proposal. The idea at that time was radical and simple: turn all accounts into smart contracts, and let the code rather than the private key be the sole controller of the account.

  But the ideal is full, and the reality is very skinny. Ethereum carries a heavier historical burden than any new chain - millions of existing EOA accounts, assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and a large and complex ecosystem. Any radical changes could have disastrous consequences.

  So began a long technical march:

  • The 2015 EIP-101 envisioned the blueprint for contractual accounts.

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

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

  • ERC-4337, proposed in 2021, was launched in 2023, achieving account abstraction without changing the protocol layer.

  • EIP-7702, proposed based on EIP-3074 in 2024, was finally deployed on the mainnet in the Pectra upgrade in 2025.

  This decade of exploration is like changing the engine on a flying plane - to ensure safety and achieve upgrades, every step must be extremely cautious. EIP-7702 brings not only a change in technical architecture, but also a technical foundation for improving user experience. Let's look forward to the upcoming future:

  Passkeytechnology: You no longer need to remember 12 mnemonics, you can safely access your digital assets with Touch ID or Face ID.

  Gmailretrieval: When you forget how to access your wallet, you can use ZK Email technology to send a zero-knowledge proof to your Gmail to restore control of your wallet without leaking any privacy. It sounds like magic, but it is real technology.

  One-click complexDeFioperations: For heavy users on the chain, multiple transactions can be packaged together for execution - a complex sequence of operations from lending to trading to staking can be completed with one click, greatly reducing waiting time and the risk of failure. Of course, a reliable wallet is needed to build such a transaction for you.

  Looking back at the Pectra upgrade, we once again see Ethereum's thinking and persistence on the future direction. The L2 grand strategy has entered a stable execution period. Although Ethereum's roadmap has changed in details, the core goal remains the same: to build a secure, decentralized, highly scalable and easy-to-verify green blockchain. The introduction of various user experience proposals represents Ethereum's unremitting exploration of enhancing competitiveness while ensuring decentralization - even in the face of fierce competition from the new generation of public chains, it must insist on becoming the ideal world computer.

  Starry Sea——Moving towards openness and fairness

  On July 30, 2024, on the ninth anniversary of Ethereum, Vitalik asked a profound question of the times at EDCON: "The past ten years of Ethereum have been a decade of our focus on theory, and by 2024, we have the technology. In the next 10 years, we really have to change our focus, not only to consider L1, but also to really think about what impact we actually have on the world."

  Ten years ago, a 19-year-old boy was writing code with his teammates in an office in Berlin, dreaming of creating a "world computer". Ten years later, his dream has been partially realized: Ethereum today carries trillions of dollars in value circulation, connects tens of millions of users around the world, 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 divergence of Layer 2, and on to the ups and downs of the decade-long journey toward account abstraction, every crisis marks the beginning of a new life, and every controversy drives the process of evolution. Ten years later, Ethereum remains an unfinished world computer, a work in progress. Starting from nothing in its early days, Ethereum abandoned efficiency considerations and operated as a protocol, becoming a resilient system. It carries humanity's collective imagination for a more open, fairer, and more autonomous digital future. And this, perhaps, is 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. This article is not intended to provide (i) investment advice or investment recommendations; (ii) an offer or solicitation to buy, sell or hold digital assets; (iii) financial, accounting, legal or tax advice. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of such information. Holding digital assets (including stablecoins and NFTs) involves high risks and may fluctuate significantly. You should carefully consider whether trading or holding digital assets is suitable for you based on your financial situation. Please consult your legal/tax/investment professional for your specific situation. Please be responsible for understanding and complying with relevant local applicable laws and regulations.