Ethereum Ten Years: Vitalik's Journey of Thought Evolution

On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum mainnet was officially launched.

Unlike the mysterious origins of Bitcoin, the development trajectory of Ethereum has always been accompanied by the figure of its founder, Vitalik Buterin. This young technological idealist has spent a decade continuously integrating his philosophical ideas and values into the code and development direction of Ethereum.

From the initial vision of a "world computer" to the governance reflections after the DAO crisis, and then to the Merge and deep reforms of the foundation, each evolution of Ethereum bears the imprint of Vitalik's thoughts.

The ten-year journey of Ethereum is also the journey of Vitalik's evolving thoughts.

Utopia of Idealists

The financial crisis of 2008 led to bank failures and a collapse of trust, and it was during this time that Bitcoin was born. This emerging technology not only attracted tech geeks but also changed the life trajectory of 17-year-old Vitalik Buterin.

In 2011, Vitalik learned about Bitcoin through his father. He began searching online for Bitcoin forums and found people willing to pay him in Bitcoin for his articles. Soon, Vitalik's articles caught the attention of Bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie, and the two co-founded Bitcoin Magazine at the end of 2011.

In 2013, after touring the world and visiting the Bitcoin community, Vitalik was convinced that the understanding of blockchain 2.0 at the time was incorrect. He realized that if a version of Bitcoin could be created with a Turing-complete programming language, it would be possible to provide various digital services on the blockchain.

In November of the same year, 19-year-old Vitalik released the Ethereum white paper, proposing the vision of a "world computer." This white paper quickly caused a stir in the crypto community, and people realized for the first time that blockchain could be not only a currency but also a decentralized platform for globalization.

At that time, Vitalik was a pure idealist. In an interview, he admitted to holding a dualistic worldview, believing that most social issues stem from centralization. "I see everything involving government regulation or corporate control as pure evil."

However, there is always a gap between ideals and reality. Disagreements soon arose within the team, with some co-founders wanting to develop Ethereum into a profitable business entity, while Vitalik preferred a non-profit, open community model.

In June 2014, the conflict reached its peak. Vitalik requested Charles Hoskinson and Amir Chetrit to leave the team and established the Ethereum Foundation (EF), setting a direction for non-profit governance. That same year, Gavin Wood also left due to disagreements with Vitalik over development priorities and the non-profit direction.

On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum mainnet quietly launched in a small office in Berlin. The vision of the "World Computer" became a reality from the white paper.

However, behind the halo, the young Vitalik was not fully prepared to face the more complex and harsh realities of the world.

Ideal Meets Reality

In the early days of Ethereum, Vitalik resembled a pure technical utopian. He firmly believed that the core value of blockchain lies in decentralization, emphasizing that anyone can freely build applications on Ethereum without the need for approval from a central authority.

At the Devcon 1 conference in 2015, Vitalik repeatedly emphasized the open (Open) and trustless (Trustless) characteristics of Ethereum, depicting an ideal world dominated by code rather than power.

However, decentralization does not mean that everything naturally tends toward the good. Although Vitalik opposes centralization, he inevitably becomes the final arbiter of community opinions. This subtle power paradox was completely magnified in the subsequent DAO crisis.

In 2016, The DAO, as the world's first decentralized investment fund, was launched on Ethereum, raising over 12 million Ether, worth $150 million. However, in June, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the smart contract to launch an attack, stealing approximately 3.6 million ETH.

22-year-old Vitalik faces significant challenges. The urgent need to protect investor assets conflicts greatly with the tenets of decentralized technology. Ultimately, Vitalik chose a pragmatic compromise: advocating for a hard fork to recover stolen funds and allowing the entire community to vote on the decision.

Although this decision stabilized the market, it also led to the split of Ethereum into ETH and ETC. Vitalik lost not only sleep during this crisis but also his confidence in the "perfect execution" of smart contracts. The "saint" who trusted technology 100% is gone, and a more pragmatic Vitalik has embarked on a new journey.

After the DAO crisis, Vitalik acknowledged the gap between ideals and reality in his blog. He proposed the need for stricter security audits and formal verification, and began to discuss governance issues in public speeches, emphasizing that "community collaboration" rather than technological absolutism is the key to Ethereum's success.

In 2017, the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) craze swept in, placing a heavy network burden on Ethereum. By the end of the year, the NFT game CryptoKitties caused severe congestion on Ethereum, leading to skyrocketing Gas fees. Vitalik realized that if the scalability issue was not resolved, it would be difficult for Ethereum to achieve its inclusive vision.

In the interview, he did not hide his disappointment with the speculation in the industry: "Many projects appear to be decentralized on the surface, but in reality, they are just repackaged. We must prove that the reason for the existence of blockchain is truly superior to traditional technology."

In 2018, the cryptocurrency market crashed, with ETH dropping from $1400 to $83, and a large number of ICO projects went bankrupt. Vitalik began to think about how to steer blockchain back towards a meaningful direction. He collaborated with scholars to publish "Libertarian Radicalism," proposing a quadratic voting mechanism, hoping to support truly valuable projects through a public funding model.

To address the issue of insufficient scalability, Vitalik and community developers proposed EIP-1559, introducing a dynamic Gas fee mechanism to facilitate Ethereum's transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS), in order to reduce energy consumption and improve transaction throughput.

After experiencing the DAO crisis, speculative bubbles, and price collapses, Vitalik underwent a profound shift in thinking. He transformed from a "tech saint" pursuing the extreme of decentralization to a builder who must consider security, governance, and social value.

The Battlefield Beyond Code

From 2020 to 2022, Vitalik experienced another key turning point in his thoughts: he began to confront the complexities of the real world, transforming from a purely technical idealist into a multidimensional thinker who considers social governance, public responsibility, and real politics.

In August 2020, he proposed in a blog post that blockchain can never fully achieve "trustlessness," as social contracts and power dynamics in the real world cannot be completely dissolved. This stands in stark contrast to his earlier idea of completely replacing human consensus with code.

In 2021, Vitalik criticized the single-token voting governance model, calling for the establishment of diverse consensus and soft governance mechanisms, attempting to make blockchain more aligned with the decision-making logic of human society.

In 2022, Ethereum faced significant challenges - the Merge. The transition from PoW to PoS was not smooth and faced criticism from some community members. Nevertheless, Vitalik and the foundation continued to push forward with the Merge. On September 15, Ethereum officially completed the Merge, and PoW exited the stage of history.

In February of the same year, the Russia-Ukraine war broke out. Vitalik broke his "neutral" stance and condemned Putin in Russian on social media, providing humanitarian and military support to Ukraine through crypto donations. In September, he personally went to Kyiv to attend a tech summit, expressing his support for Ukraine.

In response to criticism, Vitalik stated: "One of the decisions I made in 2022 was to try to be more daring and no longer remain neutral. I would rather Ethereum offend some people than become an empty shell that represents nothing."

After the collapse of Luna and FTX, Vitalik believes that the real issue in the crypto world is no longer the security and scalability of the underlying protocols, but rather how to realize social value at the application layer. He calls for the development of decentralized applications that can improve public governance, fund public goods, and promote transparent financial tools.

After experiencing controversies over the merge, the impact of wars, speculative frenzies, and industry collapses, Vitalik is no longer just a geek sitting behind the code. He has started to actively engage in public issues in the roles of an actor and a thinker. His ideal state has taken on a new dimension: it is not only a technical architecture but also a multidimensional experimental field where governance, freedom, and public values coexist.

Dawn in the Dark Night

After the Merge, Ethereum's technical roadmap enters a stable phase. Vitalik continues to promote public goods funding and the concept of information finance during this stage, including supporting open-source development, community governance, exploring prediction markets and data financial tools, and advocating for decentralized applications to focus on social issues and public governance.

In the face of the AI wave and "effective accelerationism", Vitalik proposed the concept of "defensive acceleration", advocating that technological development should prioritize "defense" to protect democracy and decentralized order. He warned of the risks of AI centralization and called for Ethereum to reclaim the early crypto spirit: privacy protection, open-source collaboration, and decentralized power.

However, the cryptocurrency market in 2024 did not follow Vitalik's guidance. The technological narratives he advocated, such as privacy and Layer2, were neglected by the market, and the price of ETH remained sluggish for a long time. The discourse of "Ethereum is aging" and "the foundation has lost its innovativeness" began to prevail.

Vitalik expressed his frustration on social media, but he坚持 the belief of "do not self-doubt, make yourself unshakable."

In early 2025, the Ethereum Foundation underwent significant personnel changes. Subsequently, with Circle going public and the rise of stablecoins and the RWA concept, Ethereum once again became the focus of the market. Several listed companies began to follow the MicroStrategy model by launching "ETH Reserve" programs.

In July, at the EthCC conference, Vitalik issued another warning: Web3 is at a crossroads, and developers must anchor their work in freedom, decentralization, and privacy, or the industry may betray its founding principles.

On July 30th, Ethereum celebrates its 10th anniversary. Vitalik shared the insights of a foundation member: "When banks collapse, cloud services go down, and servers are patched, Ethereum is still running. We are still moving forward. Ten years online, always moving forward."

Vitalik recently shared a lyric he likes: "If the night is not dark, why long for sweet dreams? The dawn will be the reward for those who persist." This seems to be the best commentary on the journey of Ethereum and Vitalik over the past two years: in the darkness, he chose to persist and wait for the dawn.