History of Ethereum

The crypto world is filled with exciting, mysterious, and heartwarming stories, including the origins of Ethereum. In its early days, there were eight founders, but now only one remains. This story of the eight founders of Ethereum is a fascinating exploration of the crypto world's history.

Ethereum was born after Bitcoin, with the goal of being a more advanced open-source and functional version of the Bitcoin network, mainly through the use of smart contracts. The currency that makes up the majority of the Ethereum network is very, very Bitcoin. Its massive overall market cap, which at the moment is a hefty $300 billion, makes it the second largest cryptocurrency in the world.

Ethereum is known for its functionality, NFT's, internet wallets, cloud storage, unstoppable domains, video games, and defying legal contracts. However, it wasn't always this way. In 2013, Bitcoin started at about $13 a coin and ended the year off at about 700 and $57 Bitcoin. Vitalik Buterin, a young Russian boy, watched as Bitcoin exploded into popularity and intense value.

In late 2013, Vitalik published the iconic Ethereum White Paper, which focused on the big limits of Bitcoin and proposed an advanced protocol that would provide a platform with unique potential. Instead of being a closed-ended single purpose protocol intended for specific applications, Ethereum is open-ended by design and is believed to serve as a foundational layer of both financial and non-financial protocols in the years to come.

The other seven founders of Ethereum include Mihai Elisi, Anthony Diorio, Amir Chetrit, and Charles Hoskinson. Before they eventually credited eight founders, the initial five were Vitalik, Mihai Elisi, Anthony Diorio, Amir Chetrit, and Charles Hoskinson.

Mihail Elisi, a friend of Vitalik, was a day winner or a day winner before the White Paper. They met two years prior in 2011 when they bonded and decided to co-found the famous Bitcoin magazine. By 2012, Bitcoin magazine was considered the first serious publication dedicated to cryptocurrencies ever.

Mihail was an all-around incredibly smart individual who led the efforts in establishing the actual business infrastructure and the legal frameworks required to make Ethereum exist. Today, Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency in the world, with its massive market cap and various functionalities.

Anthony Diorio, the Canadian crypto king, was a man who saw the future early. He first heard about Bitcoin in 2012 and immediately knew it had insane potential. He started buying at $9.73 a coin and soon created the Toronto Bitcoin meet-up group, which quickly scaled up to hundreds of enthusiasts. One of the early goers of the Toronto Bitcoin meet-up group was Vitalic Buterin, who became friends with Anthony. When Vitalik published his first iteration of the Ethereum White Paper, Anthony was interested in the potential and passed it on to another crypto wiz, Charles Hoskinson.

Amir Chetrit, another mysterious figure, lost faith in the traditional finance system after being involved in real estate leading up to 2008. In 2013, Amir was working on the ambitious BTC project known as Colored Coins, which were the first semblance of what would eventually become NFTs. In late 2013, Vitalik invited Amir to look over the Ethereum White Paper and join the team. He was the final 2013 member of the Etherium team and the last of the initial 5.

Charles Hoskinson, another crypto king, was also interested in the potential of the crypto madness and wanted to join the excitement. He founded the Bitcoin Education project, which aimed to gather everyone involved in Bitcoin education and knowledge understanding to create free content to bring attention and understanding to Bitcoin. He created a full-fledged free Bitcoin course called Bitcoin, which ended up getting 50,000 students up in this sucker.

With this crypto world success, Hoskinson gained momentum, got some financial backing, and got involved on a few other brief projects. He eventually got in contact with Anthony Diorio and got Charles to make some educational content for the Toronto Bitcoin meet-up group, which had now scaled up and become the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada.

In early 2014, the team added three more significant figures and founders: Gavin Wood, Jeffrey Wilke, and Joseph Lubin. Gavin Wood was constantly set on technological problem solving from implementation to programming to bugs to specifications to the first official test net. He wrote and published the official Ethereum Yellow Paper, which is a technical specification of Metallics' original white paper.

Jeffrey Wilke was another legendary crypto programmer who had a sneaky start to the inner circle. He became a part of the early famous Ethereum Skype chats but existed behind an anonymous screen name, carefully not revealing who he actually was. Jeff built up his own implementation of Ethereum in Google's GO language, eventually calling it Go Ethereum.

JoJo Lubin, the oldest and wisest of the bunch, had a fun resume of music production, software engineering, business finance, and more. He met Anthony through the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada and was eventually introduced to the boy genius himself. He was invited to join the team as the 8th and final co-founder of Ethereum, and with this the seeds were planted and it was go time for the eight founders to solidify their vision for the future of cryptocurrency.

In January 2014, the crypto world was booming with Bitcoin starting at a sleek $770 a coin. The total crypto global market cap had risen to 10.6 billion, compared to 1.7 trillion today. The North American official Bitcoin Conference was held in Miami, FL, and Anthony proposed that the new found group of founders rent a house during the conference to discuss and feel out the tone. The Ethereum team had an incredible time, and their presentations at the conference were well-received

The crypto market was on fire, and a theorem came along at the perfect time to further grow the flames. The Ethereum team moved their main operation to Switzerland, and work became intense. The online following was growing, and the Ethereum team was developing quickly. Gavin published the Ethereum Yellow Paper in April, and Anthony, Joe, and Amir were going through Silicon Valley, Texas Tech Events, and eventually Anthony's Toronto Bitcoin Conference.

In April 2014, after all the rapid growth and seriousness of the project, some huge decisions needed to be made about the future of Ethereum. Charles Hoskinson, who believed Etherium was too big at this point, argued that the best course of action was to create a for-profit company, take VC investments centralized in Switzerland, and focus on building a protocol. On the contrary, the developer side of the team argued for the setup of a nonprofit foundation that could hold a crowd sale and use that to fund a collection of companies within Ethereum to build up an ecosystem and let anyone participate that wanted to. This would create a completely horizontal power structure.

The arguments began and continued, with Charles having a few big concerns with this model. He argued that this foundation of theirs would eventually have brain death because of no equity, no chaining, and no vesting. He said that this would cause a scattering, leaving everyone to go off and start their own things.

The Ethereum group scheduled a convergence in Switzerland to discuss everything and make their final decision. This is a problem, as the Ethereum community had contrasting ideas on how the business should be structured. For example, if one person was passionately against living in the USA and the other was a red, white, and blue bleed and national pride country, they might want to structure their life differently.

In summary, the Ethereum team faced a series of challenges and decisions regarding the future of their project, including funding, funding, and structuring the business. After weeks of fighting and growing separated, the Ethereum group decided to convene in Switzerland to discuss their final decision.

In June 2014, Ethereum's founders held a meeting in Zug, Switzerland, known as Crypto Valley. Tensions were high and opinions were strong around the project, leading to a boardroom brawl. Vitalik made the final call, and Charles Hoskinson and Amir Hoskinson were fired from the Etherium project. Anthony Diorio was also fired, as he lost a lot of his drive for the project once the non-profit path decision was made. Joe Lubin took a backseat and later got kicked from the project, while Mihai Handsome stayed on as Vice President of the Ethereum Foundation, non-profit until late 2015, when he started working on a new project called Akasha.

Jeff Wilk made his exit with more speculation involved, after a series of hard forks in the Ethereum network, such as the DAO exploit slash hard forked scandal of 2016. Video handed over his duties to Peter Zellaby, effectively dropping his role in the Etherium project. He also had other big dreams to develop a video game, which may have been his inspiration. Jeff Wilke was the longest remaining member of the team of founders besides Vitalik himself, Amir Chetri, who kept it discreet and valued his privacy.

Gavin Wood left the Ethereum project at the end of 2015 after talking with friends and fellow programmers, Katie and Merrick. They pitched him an idea where they wrote up a fresh implementation from the ground up in a new programming language called Rust. Gavin enjoyed challenging himself and said this was just the thing he wanted to learn and focus on. This thing would eventually become Gavin's brainchild blockchain protocol known as polka dot. These days, polka dots dot trades for about $15 per coin with a market cap of about 16 billion.

In 2021, there is only one face that represents Atheoria, and that is Vitalik. He continues his work on the Ethereum project, currently developing the long anticipated Ethereum 2.0. The founding days of Ethereum are a wild one, as there are too many cooks in the kitchen. When you take a sack full of ideological, stern-minded crypto geniuses and throw them into a startup house in Switzerland, eventually the innovativeness will be halted by fundamental dispute.

In summary, the founding days of Ethereum were a complex and contentious period, with the founders being Vitalik, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Diorio, Joe Lubin, Mihai Handsome, Jeff Wilk, Gavin Wood, and Gavin Wood. The founders' decisions and the eventual demise of the project have left a lasting impact on the development of the Ethereum project and the future of the Ethereum community.