Almost ten years ago, in 2008, the unknown person or a group of people designed Bitcoin as a totally new method of sending and receiving values over the internet. Soon after that in 2012, a young 19-year old programmer had a vision of creating a platform which would not be based on BTC, but something totally new that would completely change the internet of modern-day. A Canadian-based programmer, Vitalik Buterin , developed his interest in Bitcoin in 2011.
First, he was one of the founders that launched news platform "Bitcoin Magazine" in 2011. In the beginning, the news platform consisted of several hundred articles that Buterin wrote about new digital currency world. Later, he continued his career by coding for Dark Wallet and Egora, the online marketplace.
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While working on this new and exciting technology, he has got an idea of developing a platform that would serve not only for the Bitcoin financial use but something much bigger. The white paper was this project was made in 2013, explaining the new alternative platform made for all types of decentralized app developers. In the beginning, it was called Ethereum.
Later, Ethereum became a well-known platform for creating smart contracts easily, having a code system that many developers were able to use to create a wide range of applications. For this innovative piece of work, Vitalik Buterin was awarded 2014 Thiel fellow, where he won $100,000.
Growth of Ethereum
After Vitalik Buterin displayed the Ethereum white paper to the public, numerous developers supported the project by joining forces in Ethereum development efforts. Dr. Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum, created a yellow paper for Ethereum, which he called a sort of technical bible. Its role was to determine and explain the specification for EVM, the Ethereum virtual machine. EVM was supposed to serve as the main component of this system that handles the ledger and runs smart contracts.
After Vitalik Buterin displayed the Ethereum white paper to the public, numerous developers supported the project by joining forces in Ethereum development efforts.Crowdfunding campaign
Another co-founder of this system, Joseph Lubin, found the ConsenSys, an American startup with a focus on creating all sorts of decentralized applications. In 2014, in order to get this big project going, Vitalik Buterin and his colleagues launched a crowdfunding campaign where project supporters were able to purchase Ether and Ethereum tokens that served as shares.
First live release
As it rose to around $18 million, it was the most successful campaign ever at that time. After one more year of work, the first platform live release, called Frontier, was finally launched in the summer of 2015. It wasn't really the best looking platform, but its command interface allowed other developers to use a platform for designing their own decentralized applications.
The outcome
After this smart contract-based project was finally launched, it has got a lot of success early in its short existence. By today, it became a center of attention of numerous developers including the biggest names in the tech industry, such as Microsoft and IBM. The funds from the initial Ethereum campaign, which was around $18 million, and the whole project development are now managed and monitored by the Ethereum Foundation, which is a Swiss-based non-profit organization.
Going mainstream
In early 2017, Ethereum entered the mainstream scene when the price for 1 ETH increased by thousand percent in just several months. It also affected the growth of other alternative Blockchain-based currencies, called altcoins. As the huge number of new investors took part in supporting the development of this project, Ethereum started to dominate the headlines of some major media houses, such as Reuters, CNBC, and Quartz.
The next big step that all investors and developers were waiting for was a launch of Metropolis. It was supposed to be the newest update of Ethereum network, with the aim to offer many new functions and offer developers more user-friendly app design options.
