The most important Ethereum milestones
Ethereum has experienced numerous notable milestones in its roughly decade-long history. Here is a list of important dates and events that have shaped Ethereum and the broader crypto community since its inception:
- December 2013 – Vitalik Buterin publishes the Ethereum white paper
- June 2014 – The Ethereum team looks to raise $16 million in an ICO campaign
- August 2014 – Roughly 51 million ETH were sold in the two month long initial public sale
- July 2015 – Ethereum mainnet launches
- August 2015 – ETH starts trading
- July 2016 – Ethereum forks into two blockchains–Ethereum and Ethereum Classic–as a result of a smart contract hack
- February 2018 – Ethereum controls over 80% market share of ICOs, with most new tokens based on the ERC-20 standard
- December 2019 – Istanbul hard fork takes place and sets the stage for the Proof-of-Stake transition
- December 2020 – The Beacon Chain goes live and kicks off “Phase 0” of the Ethereum 2.0 rollout
- August 2021 – The London upgrade goes live and introduces real-time ETH burning
- September 2022 – Ethereum transitions from PoW to PoS after a successful Merge; a part of the Ethereum community protests the transition, which results in a split and subsequent launch of Ethereum PoW (ETHW)