Ethereum Series (Part 4): A Review of Ethereum’s Development History

Ethereum History

For recent history, see Taylor Gerring's blog post.

Birth

At the same time, Vitalik began to work with Dr. Gavin Wood to create Ethereum. In April 2014, Gavin published the Ethereum Yellow Paper as a technical description of the Ethereum virtual machine. According to the specific instructions in the Yellow Paper, the Ethereum client has been implemented in 7 programming languages ​​(C++, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, Haskell, Rust), making the software more optimized overall.

1. Ethereum launches cryptocurrency 2.0 network - Coindesk article, early January 2014

2. Announcing Ethereum on bitcointalk — Vitalik first announced Ethereum to the Bitcoin community. Forum post received 5,000 replies.

Ethereum Foundation and Ether Presale

In addition to developing the Ethereum software, launching a new cryptocurrency and blockchain requires a significant amount of ancillary programming effort to assemble the resources needed to get it up and running. In order to quickly build a large network of developers, miners, and other stakeholders, Ethereum announced a presale of ether, the unit of Ethereum currency. The legal and financial complexities of raising funds through a presale led to the creation of several legal entities, including the Ethereum Foundation (Stiftung Ethereum), which was established in June 2014 in Zug, Switzerland.

Starting in June 2014, Ethereum distributed the first batch of ether via a 42-day public ether presale, netting 31,591 bitcoins, then worth $18,439,086, in exchange for approximately 60,102,216 ether. The proceeds from the sale were first used to pay off mounting legal debts, reward developers for months of hard work, and fund the continued development of Ethereum.

1. Ether sale launched - first official announcement on the Ethereum blog

2. A concise statistics page about the presale on Ether.Fund (since deprecated)

3. Overview: Ethereum’s first public sale - slacknation blog post - all the stats about the ether presale

4. Statement on pre-sale terms

ETH/DEV and Ethereum Development

After the successful pre-sale of ether, Ethereum development was formalized under the management of the non-profit ETH DEV, which manages Ethereum development under the contract of Ethereum Suisse - Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke are the three directors of the organization. Developer interest in Ethereum continued to grow steadily throughout 2014, and the ETH DEV team released a series of proofs of concept (PoC) for evaluation by the developer community. The frequent posts by the ETH DEV team on the Ethereum blog also maintained Ethereum's continued attraction to the public and strong development momentum. The increasing traffic and user base on the Ethereum forums and Ethereum subreddit proved that the platform was attracting the interest of a rapidly growing and enthusiastic developer community, a trend that has continued to this day.

DEVCON-0

In April 2014, ETH DEV organized the DEVCON-0 event, where Ethereum developers from all over the world gathered in Berlin to discuss various Ethereum technical issues. Some of the presentations and meetings at DEVcon-0 later drove Ethereum towards a more reliable, secure, and scalable direction. Overall, this event inspired developers to continue working towards the goal of releasing Ethereum.

1. DEVCON-0 speech video playlist

2. DEVCON-0 reddit post

3. Gav's DEV Update on DEVCON-0

4. DEVcon-0 Blog Post Summary

DEVgrants Project

In April 2015, the DEVgrants program was launched to provide funding for all contributions to the Ethereum platform and projects based on Ethereum. Hundreds of developers have contributed their time and wisdom to Ethereum and open source projects. This program aims to reward and support the efforts of developers. The DEVgrants program is still running today, and the last update on the project funding was in January 2016.

1. DEVgrants first release

2. DEVCON-1 announces new fund

3. DEVgrants public gitter room

4. Wendell Davis's talk on DEVgrants at DEVCON-1 on Youtube

Olympic testnet, bug bounties and security reviews

Development in 2014 and 2015 went through a series of proof-of-concept releases, leading to the ninth POC public testnet, known as Olympic. The developer community was invited to test the network to its limits, and large bounties were allocated to those who held various records or managed to break the system in some way. A month after the live launch, the official prizes were announced.

In early 2015, the Ethereum Bounty Program was launched, offering BTC rewards to those who found any weaknesses in the Ethereum software stack. This is undoubtedly beneficial to the reliability, security and technical confidence of Ethereum community. This bounty program is still active today and there are no plans to end it.

The Ethereum security review began in late 2014 and lasted until the first half of 2015. Ethereum invited many third-party software security companies to conduct end-to-end reviews of all key components of the protocol (Ethereum VM, network, proof of work). The review found many security issues, and after the issues were raised and re-tested, a more secure platform was created.

1. Olympic testnet pre-release - Vitalik's blog post details the Olympic awards

2. Olympic Prizes Announced — Vitalik’s blog post details the winners and prizes

3. Bug bounty program launched

4. Ethereum Bounty Program Website

5. Least Authority Review Blog Post – Link to Review Report

6. Deja Vu censorship blog post

Ethereum Frontier Launched

The Ethereum Frontier network was launched on July 30, 2015, and developers began writing smart contracts and decentralized applications to be deployed on the Ethereum live network. In addition, miners began to join the Ethereum network to help secure the Ethereum blockchain and earn Ether from mining blocks. Although the release of Frontier was the first milestone of the Ethereum project and developers only intended it as a test version, it turned out to be more useful and reliable than anyone expected, and developers immediately began building solutions to improve the Ethereum ecosystem.

See also:

1. Vinay Gupta's initial release process announcement

2. Frontier is coming - Frontier release announcement by Stephan Tual

3. The final step of Frontier launch - additional posting after release

4. Ethereum Launched with Frontier Launch

5. Frontier website

DEVCON-1

The second developer conference DEVCON-1 was held in London in early November 2015. The 5-day conference had more than 100 presentations, panels and quick discussions, attracting more than 400 attendees, including developers, entrepreneurs, thinkers and business executives. All speeches were recorded and can be watched for free.

Major companies like UBS, IBM and Microsoft have made clear their interest in the technology. Microsoft announced that it will offer Ethereum on its new blockchain as a service on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This announcement marks the moment when Ethereum-centric blockchain technology went mainstream and will be remembered as DEVCON-1.

1. DEVCON-1 Talks YouBe Playlist

2. Full list of DEVCON-1 presentations on the website, some with links to slides

Historical Resources

1. Simple timetable diagram

References:

For links to the list in the article, please refer to "Ethereum Homestead Documentation" page 8 1.1.5 History of Ethereum Taylor Gerring blog: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/02/09/cut-and-try-building-a-dream/

In the next article, we will introduce "Ethereum Series (V): Introduction to the Ethereum Community, Foundation, and Contributors"

Thanks to Azure and Bob from the Chaoxi team for participating in the translation and proofreading of "Ethereum Homestead Documentation".