It was about five years ago that we saw the birth of a new idea in the blockchain community. Bitcoin was about seven years then. The original concept came to materialize an essential feature of blockchain technology: smart contracts. Ethereum was that new general-purpose blockchain. It soon found itself on the hottest headlines of technology media and also the novice blockchain ones.
Ethereum came with a great promise to revolutionize the blockchain ecosystem. It wanted to show the world that blockchain is not only for commercial purposes and plans like future money. Ethereum wanted to improve blockchain to become the fundamental technology infrastructure for everything. The concept later gave birth to the most critical blockchain innovations.
Historical Milestones
Maybe the DAO hack was one of the most critical past incidents in Ethereum’s history. When about $60 million funds were lost, everyone thought the days for Ethereum are numbered. But the community passed that step and went forward to improve the security and reliability of the platform. The hack also resulted in a split in Ethereum community and gave birth to Ethereum Classic.
Ethereum is the heaven of decentralized applications – known as dApps. It provides a platform for developers to make blockchain-based products and issue their specific tokens. One of the first dApps that raised the bar for the popularity of Ethereum was CryptoKitties. The collectible game, launched in 2017 soon became very popular that showed the enormous potential of blockchain-based gaming, too.
The extraordinary growth of CryptoKitties had another impact on the Ethereum community. It showed the limitations of the platform. The Ethereum Foundation acknowledged the need for improving the efficiency on the platform. As a result, a new concept named Ethereum 2.0 was introduced. The latest version will leverage any remaining feature and capability of the blockchain industry to offer a more reliable platform for developers.
One of the other essential milestones in Ethereum’s history was the introduction of ICO. A new solution for startups – especially blockchain ones – to find investors using crowdfunding-like cryptocurrency offering. 
Ethereum made it easy for those teams too issue their tokens and sell them to potential customers to raise funds. The ICO reached its peak in 2018 with about $8bn raised in more than 1,000 projects. Although there some severe problems like scams happened in ICOs, it showed the potential to use blockchain as a means to build crowdfund projects.
What to Expect For Ethereum
Ethereum’s main coin, ETH, has been long the second cryptocurrency regarding market cap. It still has vast potentials to help the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Ethereum 2.0 and DeFi are currently the most critical components of this community. Ethereum 2.0 can pave the way for more efficient decentralized projects. Its plans were designed in 2015 to launch a more efficient blockchain that doesn’t rely on the same principles of Bitcoin.
The recent boom in DeFi development with the hope for a considerable revolution in the financial sector keeps Ethereum the star of blockchain projects.
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