Ethereum officially turned 10 on July 30, 2025. What began as a visionary proposal by Vitalik Buterin in late 2013 has evolved into the world’s most important smart contract blockchain, laying the foundations for Defi, NFTS, DAOS and more.
In this article, we look back at the most important events, technical breakthroughs and market milestones on our Ethereum journey. From its release to today’s ever-evolving Ethereum 2.0 landscape.
📅Ethereum Timeline: Major Milestones by Year and Month
This is a monthly breakdown of Ethereum’s most important achievements covering network launches, forks, protocol upgrades and the highest ever highs.
2013
November 2013: Vitalik Buterin publishes Ethereum Whitepaper, which outlines a distributed platform that supports smart contracts.
2014
January 2014: Ethereum was officially announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference.
July-August 2014: Ethereum retains the ICO, raising 31,000 BTC (~$18 million).
2015
July 30, 2015: Ethereum will be officially released in the frontier version.
ETH is around $0.75 in the first few weeks of a live transaction.
2016
March 2016: Ethereum deploys Homestead upgrades (the first major network upgrade).
June 2016: A DAO exploit occurs, ejecting 3.6m of ETH.
July 2016: Ethereum follows a controversial hard fork, leading to the creation of Ethereum Classic (ETC).
ETH reaches $20 before Dao Hack and drops.
2017
March 2017: The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) will be released by Microsoft, JPMorgan, and others.
June 2017: Ethereum’s ICO boom surge. The project will raise billions through ERC-20 tokens.
December 2017: ETH hits $826, marking the first major price increase.
2018
January 13, 2018: ETH attacks a new $1,420 ATH during the peak of the code bull market.
Throughout 2018, the concept of Defi, including Makerdao and Compound, begins to emerge.
2019
February 2019: Constantinople upgrade adds important efficiency improvements.
December 2019: ETH 2.0 development will gain the release and pace of Beacon Chain Testnet.
2020
March 2020: ETH will fall below $100 during Covid Crash.
Summer 2020: Defi Summer Kick -off – Uniswap, Aave, Compound explodes in use.
December 1, 2020: The Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain is live, marking phase 0 of the Eth Proof-of-Stake roadmap.
2021
April-May 2021: NFTS has become mainstream and there are projects such as the launch of the boring APE Yacht Club.
May 12, 2021: ETH hits a new $4,362 ATH.
August 5, 2021: The EIP-1559 was released as an upgrade in London, with basic fee burns introduced.
November 10, 2021: ETH hits the final bull market ATH of $4,878.
USD Chart Showing Ethereum Showing Ethereum in 2021 – TradingView
2022
June 2022: Ethereum testnet begins to successfully merge before the merge.
September 15, 2022: Merge occurs – Ethereum officially transitions from proof of work to proof of property. Large environmental milestones.
The price of the ETH is around $1,600 at the time of merge.
2023
April 12, 2023: Shanghai upgrade will stop ETH from stakeing and phase 1 of Ethereum 2.0 is completed.
ETH Price: Easy to touch on the $2,100 upgrade.
Rollup, Arbitrum-like L2, optimism, Zksync take center stage.
2024
Q1 2024: The Ethereum Ecosystem is fueled by the story of modular blockchains – laminae and resetting regeneration.
May 2024: L2 activities set records and ETH fees remain stable despite high demand.
ETH Prices: Surges above $3,700 amid a wider market gathering.
2025
May 2025: Ethereum Developer Community completes plans for Verkle Trees and Proto-Danksharding.
July 30, 2025: Ethereum turns 10 years old. 10 years of open source innovation and financial revolution.
Currently, ETH is trading near $3,300-3,500, showing resilience ahead of the next bull cycle.
🎉Ethereum ten years later legacy
Ethereum has not only survived the brutal cycle of the crypto market. It led to innovation. It created a roll-up-centered roadmap for smart contracts, distributed finance, NFT, and Web3.
Networks have moved from work proof to scalable proof models, burning millions of ETH, reducing issuance, and evolved towards modular architectures.
With Ethereum’s 10th birthday in the book, the next decade will allow scalable ZK-Rollups, mainstream tokenization, AI X blockchain integration and even deflationary esthetics to become the norm.
