Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin's World Computer, The DAO Hack and the Merge

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In late 2013 Vitalik Buterin, a programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, argued that a blockchain could run programs, not just track money, but Bitcoin's scripting language is deliberately not Turing complete. After a Colored Coins project with the CEO of eToro stalled, he proposed a new platform. In January 2014, around a Bitcoin conference in Miami, Buterin, Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin rented a house to plan it. Buterin took the name from Wikipedia's list of science fiction elements. A 2014 crowdfund sold ether for bitcoin, and the Frontier release went live on July 30, 2015, running on Gavin Wood's Ethereum Virtual Machine with gas fees that stop infinite loops by charging for every step.

In 2016 The DAO, a smart contract investment fund, raised about $150 million, and in June a hacker used a re-entrancy flaw to drain about $50 million in ether. The community hard forked to return the funds, and holdouts kept the original chain as Ethereum Classic. CryptoKitties used the ERC-721 standard in 2017 and jammed the network, and by late 2020 over $11 billion sat in DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, Aave and MakerDAO. In September 2022 the Merge replaced proof of work with proof of stake, in which validators stake 32 ETH and face slashing, cutting energy use by over 99 percent. The March 2024 Dencun upgrade added blobs to cut layer 2 data costs.

• Gas is priced in gwei, named after B-money creator Wei Dai, and each transaction's base fee is burned.
• Christie's auctioned a Beeple artwork as an NFT for $69.3 million.
• Microsoft, Intel and Mastercard joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance in 2017.
• JPMorgan built JPM Coin on Quorum, a private, permissioned variant of Ethereum.
• The CFTC signals ether is a commodity, and the Uniform Commercial Code now covers it as a controllable electronic record.