Although a devastating hack destroyed the party, the crypto community celebrated Ethereum’s 8th birthday on Sunday, July 30, to commemorate the day that started a real blockchain revolution.
July 30 marks the 8th anniversary of the official launch of the Ethereum mainnet. On July 30, 2015, Ethereum was officially launched and the founding block was generated.
At present, the total number of transactions in Ethereum has exceeded 2.05 billion Txns, the number of…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) July 30, 2023
On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum Foundation announced the mainnet launch of the Ethereum network. To reminisce the day, the Ethereum Foundation has pinned the blog post by former CCO Stephan Tual announcing the network launch. It starts as:
“A few minutes ago, many of you generated and loaded the Ethereum Genesis block, marking the inception of Frontier, the first Live release of the Ethereum project… The vision of a censorship-proof ‘world computer’ that anyone can program, paying exclusively for what they use and nothing more, is now a reality,” reads the blog post.
What Ethereum Has Achieved So Far?
Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s first blockchain, was already six years old when Ethereum went live. However, Bitcoin only allowed simple monetary transactions as a payment network. Ethereum was launched to realize the full potential of blockchain.
Ethereum is the first smart contract-enabled blockchain that enabled many blockchain uses cases that the crypto community enjoys today. It includes decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, Web 3, and tokenization.
Since its birth, Ethereum has never looked back. According to the data by OkLink, the total number of transactions in Ethereum has exceeded 2.05 billion Txns, the number of currency-holding addresses has reached 66.12 million, the total circulation is 47.22 million, and the total amount of burning is about 2.986 million. There are over 19,000 monthly active developers on the network.
The native Ether (ETH) was and is the second-largest crypto coin in the world after BTC, with a market capitalization of $226.78 billion. According to the co-host of the crypto podcast Bankless, Ethereum currently has “$400 billion in secured value, $3.6 billion in annualized profits, and a total of 17.8 million blocks of uncensorable digital property.”
Happy birthday Ethereum! 🎂
$400 billion in secured value, $3.6 billion in annualized profits, and a total of 17.8 million blocks of uncensorable digital property.
Not bad for an 8 year old.
— RYAN SΞAN ADAMS – rsa.eth (@RyanSAdams) July 30, 2023
Ethereum laid track for all the big public smart-contract blockchains, like Solana, Avalanche, BSC, Tezos, and Algorand.
Binance CEO Shares Some Memories
To celebrate Ethereum’s 8th birthday, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) shared his moments with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin before the launch. In his tweet, CZ shares a picture with Buterin while they were in Tokyo in May 2015, just two months before the launch.
On this 8th birthday of #Ethereum, a little throw back to May 2, 2015, in Tokyo🇯🇵, just before #ETH was officially born. @VitalikButerin stayed in my apartment in Tokyo during this trip. He was already working on and talking about ETH non-stop. And I still missed (didn't buy)… pic.twitter.com/84B6KN73Qf
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) July 30, 2023
He said Buterin stayed in his apartment during the visit and spoke about ETH “non-stop.” CZ joked about missing out on buying Ethereum at inception, saying, “If I had bought ETH then, I might not have had the need or drive to start Binance.”
Ethereum developer Lefteris Karapetsas also shared his memories of the Ethereum launch. He wrote:
“It was 8 years ago today, we launched #ethereum from a small office in Waldemarstraße 37A in Berlin. What a journey its been since then? It became the most widely used cryptocurrency network, switched to PoS, and spawned many alt-L1s and L2s.”
It was 8 years ago today, we launched #ethereum from a small office in Waldemarstraße 37A in Berlin
What a journey its been since then?
It became the most widely used cryptocurrency network, switched to PoS and spawned many alt-L1s and L2s
🦄Excited for what the future brings! pic.twitter.com/bmgcjTVLbE
— Lefteris Karapetsas | Hiring for @rotkiapp (@LefterisJP) July 30, 2023
