By Yuliya, PANews

On July 30, 2025, Ethereum will reach a significant milestone, marking the tenth anniversary of its mainnet launch. As a representative blockchain project, Ethereum has not only transformed the cryptocurrency landscape but also provided a robust infrastructure for decentralized applications (DApps). At this crucial moment, the price of ETH is attempting to break through the four-year resistance level established since 2021, aiming for $4,000. That day, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, along with core contributors including Tim Beiko, Joseph Lubin, Tomasz Stańczak, and Hsiao-wei Wang, will deliver speeches during the 10th Anniversary Celebration livestream. Looking back on Ethereum's decade-long development, from the founding eight to the rise of the decentralized community, a group of visionary and talented individuals have been behind the project. Their journeys have not only shaped Ethereum to its present state, but also influenced the future of the entire blockchain industry. The Beginnings of Ethereum In 2013, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin proposed a bold vision: to create a Turing-complete blockchain platform to support the development of decentralized applications. This idea attracted Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit to join, forming the original Ethereum project team. Soon after, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke joined, forming the "Genesis Eight." However, differences in philosophy and goals ultimately led to the group's subsequent split.

January 2014, Miami, The Ethereum founding team made their first collective appearance

Vitalik Buterin

As the founder and spiritual leader of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin's life trajectory is closely intertwined with the world of crypto. At the age of six, he immigrated to Canada with his family and early on displayed a prodigious talent for mathematics, programming, and economics. At 17, he learned about Bitcoin from his father, computer scientist Dmitry Buterin. Surprisingly, Vitalik has stated that one of his motivations for creating Ethereum stemmed from Blizzard's 2010 nerfing of the abilities of his beloved Warlock character in World of Warcraft, which made him deeply aware of the drawbacks of centralized services. In 2011, to earn Bitcoin, he began writing for a blog, which led him to meet Mihai Alisie. Together, they founded Bitcoin Magazine, the first serious publication dedicated to cryptocurrency. Perhaps this experience led him to delve into the world of crypto. In 2013, after visiting numerous crypto projects around the world, he concluded that Bitcoin's capabilities were too limited and published the Ethereum white paper, proposing a Turing-complete blockchain platform. In 2014, he received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship established by Peter Thiel and immediately dropped out of the University of Waterloo to devote himself full-time to Ethereum development.

As the helmsman of Ethereum, Vitalik continues to lead the evolution of the technical roadmap. On September 15, 2022, Ethereum successfully completed "The Merge," transitioning from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a PoS consensus mechanism, reducing energy consumption by 99%. Vitalik stated, "Our long-cherished dream has finally come true." On April 12, 2023, the Shapella upgrade was completed, allowing stakers to withdraw their ETH for the first time. On June 9 of the same year, he published a blog post titled "The Three Transitions," outlining three key transitions that Ethereum must undergo to mature: Layer 2 (L2) scaling, wallet security (transitioning to smart contract wallets), and privacy protection. He emphasized that without achieving true decentralization and privacy protections, Ethereum could repeat its past mistakes.

Recently, Vitalik's reflections have become increasingly profound. In June 2025, he stated at the ETHGlobal Prague conference that Ethereum's Layer 1 (L1) would achieve approximately tenfold capacity expansion within a year. On July 2nd, at the EthCC conference in France, he again warned that if decentralization remained merely a slogan, Ethereum would face an existential crisis, and proposed three core criteria for evaluating decentralization. On July 27th, as the tenth anniversary of the Ethereum mainnet approached, he retweeted the message "Ethereum has been running stably for ten years with zero downtime" on the X platform, highlighting the network's achievements. In addition to his technical contributions, Vitalik is also actively involved in philanthropy, donating billions of dollars worth of crypto assets to the SENS Research Foundation, the Indian COVID-19 Relief Fund, and humanitarian aid in Ukraine. He also expressed deep concern about the potential risks of AI, believing that superintelligent AI could pose an existential threat to humanity. He advocated for a "d/acc" philosophy of technological development that prioritizes defense, decentralization, and democracy.

Charles Hoskinson

Charles Hoskinson, formerly the CEO of Ethereum, studied mathematics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder, and founded the Bitcoin Education Project in 2013.

In late 2013, he co-founded Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin and others. However, he and Vitalik had fundamental disagreements over the direction of the project. Hoskinson advocated for Ethereum to be a commercial company and attract venture capital, arguing that "a horizontal power structure that puts cleaners on equal footing with senior management is insane." Vitalik, on the other hand, insisted on a non-profit and decentralized approach. This ideological conflict ultimately led to Hoskinson's removal from the team in 2014.

After leaving Ethereum, Hoskinson remained undeterred. In late 2014, he co-founded the blockchain engineering and research firm IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong) with former Ethereum colleague Jeremy Wood. IOHK's flagship project is the public blockchain platform Cardano (ADA). Its rigorous academic research style and peer-review system have distinguished it in the industry, earning it the nickname "Japanese Ethereum" or the first "Ethereum Killer." It still maintains a place in the top ten by market capitalization. Hoskinson insists that Cardano will not accept venture capital, believing it violates the decentralized principles of blockchain. In recent years, Hoskinson has remained active at the forefront of the industry, frequently making bold predictions. He recently stated that Bitcoin's price could increase tenfold to $1 million, and he believes Cardano (ADA) has even greater growth potential, potentially increasing 100-fold or even 1,000-fold. In addition to his contributions to the crypto space, Hoskinson is also involved in philanthropy and politics. In 2021, he donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University to establish the Center for Formal Mathematics and funded Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb's deep-sea expedition to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. He also announced the formation of a political action committee called "Wyoming Integrity" in February 2025.

Anthony Di Iorio

As a wealthy second-generation rich man and angel investor, Anthony Di Iorio was one of the key figures in funding the launch of Ethereum. He discovered Bitcoin through a podcast in 2012 and quickly became involved. That same year, he organized a Bitcoin meetup in Toronto, where he met Vitalik Buterin and worked with him to release the Ethereum whitepaper. Di Iorio's initial motivation for Ethereum was to make money. Therefore, when the team decided in 2014 to operate as a non-profit, he decided to withdraw and gradually faded from the core circle. After leaving Ethereum, Di Iorio's business ventures continued to expand. In 2014, he founded the Toronto blockchain company Decentral and launched the city's first two-way Bitcoin ATM, promoting cryptocurrency adoption in the city. In 2016, he founded Jaxx Liberty, a popular multi-currency wallet. That same year, he was hired by the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) as its first Chief Digital Officer, but he left shortly thereafter to focus on his own projects.

Although he announced in 2021 that he would no longer be involved in the cryptocurrency space for personal security reasons, he appears to have not completely withdrawn. In 2022, he launched the Andiami project, which aims to address centralization issues in decentralized networks through hardware, token economics, and game theory. Perhaps driven by the popularity of Trump's Trump coin meme, he has become active on social media again. In January of this year, he asked on the X platform, "When will Musk release a coin?" He also published a detailed report on Bybit's $1.5 billion ETH theft, analyzing the history of Ethereum's DAO rollback.

At the Consensus 2025 conference, he stated that Ethereum was not originally intended to be a competitor to Bitcoin, but rather an alternative, and believed that Ethereum, due to its wide range of application cases, had the potential to surpass Bitcoin in market capitalization.

From an early and astute investor to a successful entrepreneur, Anthony Di Iorio represents the pragmatic and business-driven side of the crypto world. Although he left Ethereum's core team early on, his early financial support was crucial to its creation.

Amir Chetrit

Amir Chetrit is the most low-key and mysterious of Ethereum's eight co-founders. A computer science enthusiast with dual American and Israeli citizenship, he previously worked in real estate.

In 2013, Chetrit met Vitalik Buterin at a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam and was invited to join the Ethereum project. At the time, he was working on an Israeli startup called Colored Coins, which aimed to manage real-world assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.

However, at the fateful June 2014 Swiss conference for Ethereum, Chetrit faced skepticism from other developers and co-founders regarding his limited contributions to the project. He ultimately agreed to step down from the core team, but remained a co-founder.

Since then, Amir Chetrit has rarely appeared in the public eye. According to sources familiar with the matter, Chetrit currently quietly supports multiple blockchain projects but rarely makes public appearances, preferring to shun publicity.

Gavin Wood

As Ethereum's first CTO, Gavin Wood was a key figure in transforming Vitalik Buterin's grand vision into code. With his strong engineering capabilities, he is known as Ethereum's "invisible brain."

In 2013, Gavin Wood met Vitalik and others and together they embarked on the journey of Ethereum. He authored the "Yellow Paper" defining the technical specifications of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). He also led the development of the smart contract programming language Solidity, laying a solid technical foundation for the entire Ethereum ecosystem. It can be said that without Gavin Wood, the implementation of Ethereum would be impossible.

However, just three months after the Ethereum mainnet launched in 2015, Gavin Wood chose to leave. He and Vitalik had a major disagreement over the engineering management model. Gavin Wood believed that the project needed more efficient centralized management, while Vitalik once again insisted on a decentralized, community-driven model.

After his departure, Gavin Wood founded Parity Technologies in 2016. He subsequently founded the Web3 Foundation and created Polkadot, a cross-chain network designed to connect different blockchains. In October 2022, he resigned as CEO of Parity and became Chief Architect to focus more on technological innovation. In April 2024, he released the gray paper for Polkadot's next-generation architecture, called JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine). In June of this year, Gavin Wood posted on the forum that he personally had no intention of issuing a new token based on the JAM protocol, and he did not believe that Parity or the Web3 Foundation should do so.

Joseph Lubin

Joseph Lubin, a Canadian-American entrepreneur with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, has the strongest business background among the eight co-founders of Ethereum. Before joining Ethereum, he worked at financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs.

When Ethereum established a non-profit model in 2014, Lubin chose not to participate in core development. However, his departure was not a break, but rather a way to engage more deeply with and build the Ethereum ecosystem. In 2015, he founded ConsenSys, a software technology company and incubator focused on the Ethereum ecosystem.

Over the past decade, ConsenSys has become one of the most important and prolific building forces in the Ethereum ecosystem. It has incubated numerous blockchain startups and contributed countless critical infrastructure and applications to Ethereum, the most successful of which are MetaMask, a wallet with hundreds of millions of users, and developer tools Infura and Truffle.

Recently, Lubin and ConsenSys have been attracting much attention. On May 27th, ConsenSys led a private investment of approximately $425 million in SharpLink Gaming, with Lubin serving as its chairman of the board. The company will purchase ETH as its primary reserve asset. Furthermore, in response to community questions about MetaMask's lack of a token offering, Lubin repeatedly hinted in June 2025 that several ConsenSys products (first and foremost, the L2 network Linea) would launch tokens and reward the community. Linea has announced that 10% of its tokens will be allocated to early contributors, with 9% airdropped to users participating in Linea voyages. Lubin has always been a staunch advocate for Ethereum. In May, he wrote in the Financial Times that blockchain networks like Ethereum could provide a new decentralized infrastructure for the global financial system, coexisting and complementing the existing system.

Mihai Alisie

Mihai Alisie was Vitalik Buterin's closest ally before the birth of Ethereum. In 2011, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine with Vitalik and served as its editor-in-chief until the end of 2013. This collaboration laid the foundation for their subsequent joint creation of Ethereum.

Alisie played a crucial role in the early days of the Ethereum project. He oversaw the establishment of the project's business infrastructure and legal framework in Switzerland and successfully facilitated the Ethereum presale, which raised over 31,000 bitcoins (worth approximately $18 million at the time) through the initial coin offering (ICO). As co-founder, strategy manager, and vice president of the Ethereum Foundation, he managed the project's early operations until the end of 2015.

Unlike the dramatic departures of others like Hoskinson, Alisie's exit was relatively peaceful. Once Ethereum was on track, he chose to pursue his own vision. In 2015, he founded Akasha, a decentralized social project based on Ethereum and IPFS, and continues to make a significant impact within the ecosystem.

To this day, Mihai Alisie remains deeply committed to Ethereum. On July 23rd, on the occasion of Ethereum's tenth anniversary, he celebrated on social media and launched an event with ETHGlobal, POAP, and others, encouraging community members to share their stories with Ethereum.

Jeffrey Wilcke

In the early days of Ethereum's technical implementation, Jeffrey Wilcke was a core force alongside Gavin Wood. While working on Mastercoin, the Netherlands' first ICO, he came across the Ethereum white paper and became deeply intrigued. He quietly wrote an Ethereum implementation in Google's Go language. In early 2014, he officially joined the list of founders alongside Gavin Wood. The Go Ethereum client he developed, Geth, became Ethereum's core and most widely used client software and remains the backbone of the network's operation to this day. However, after experiencing Ethereum's hard forks, a series of hacks, and the birth of his son, Wilcke felt physically and mentally exhausted. He handed over Geth maintenance and oversight to his right-hand man, Péter Szilágyi, and gradually stepped back from front-line development. Despite this, as an early core contributor and substantial holder of ETH, Wilcke's wealth remains a hot topic in the market. For example, in May, after months of inactivity in his wallet, he transferred approximately $262 million in ETH to Kraken. Since 2016, Wilcke has transferred 394,000 ETH to Kraken at an average price of $1,295, cashing out approximately $510 million. A New Generation of Core: Guardians and Engineers of PoS As the founding fathers fade, Ethereum continues to advance. A new generation of developers and researchers has taken up the torch, leading this "world computer" into a brighter future. Among the "Ten Key Figures," in addition to the founding eight, two other core developers represent Ethereum's newfound strength and ongoing evolution. As Ethereum undergoes its long transition from a PoW to a PoS consensus mechanism, these two new core figures have become crucial.

Danny Ryan

Vlad Zamfir

As an early core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, Vlad Zamfir is a pioneer in PoS consensus mechanism research. His research on the Casper protocol (particularly CBC Casper) laid an important theoretical foundation for Ethereum's eventual transition to PoS. Zamfir is known for his profound and sometimes radical views. He has a unique perspective on blockchain governance, having engaged in a heated public debate with cryptography pioneer Nick Szabo over his views on governance. He believes that Ethereum is not only a technical project but also a legal one, and its "anti-legal revolutionary" nature could conflict with the existing legal system. At the 2019 Devcon 5 conference, he warned that smart contracts, essentially an alternative legal form, might not gain government recognition and could even trigger regulatory backlash. In recent years, Vlad Zamfir's research focus has shifted to cutting-edge areas. In July 2020, he announced his appointment as Chief Architect of the CBC Casper protocol at CasperLabs, dedicated to accelerating its development and upgrades. In November 2024, he co-founded the Smart Transactions (STXN) project, which attracted significant attention. They created a "time machine" that allows Ethereum users to reverse "smart transactions" under certain conditions, challenging the traditional notion that blockchain transactions are immutable.

While some of his views have sparked controversy within the community, Vlad Zamfir's insightful reflections on blockchain governance and cryptoeconomics continue to provide an alternative and valuable perspective on Ethereum's development path, pushing the community to explore deeper potential.

Those indispensable "outsiders" and community strength

In addition to these two, the new generation of Ethereum leadership includes figures like Péter Szilagyi (current head of the Geth client), Tim Beiko (coordinator of the Core Developers Meeting), Dankrad Feist (named after Danksharding), and the Ethereum Foundation's two newly appointed co-executive directors: Hsiao-Wei Wang of Taiwan and Tomasz Stańczak, founder of Nethermind. It is this vast and decentralized network of developers that constitutes Ethereum's strongest barrier today.

Ethereum's story is also inseparable from the supporters who stepped forward at critical moments.

• Cancer: As an early Chinese translator of the Ethereum white paper, he foresightedly translated "Ethereum" into "Ethereum." This name is not only faithful and elegant, but also accurately conveys the platform's attributes as a "smart contract factory," profoundly influencing the Chinese-speaking community's understanding of Ethereum.
• Wanxiang Blockchain Lab and Xiao Feng: In 2015, during the Ethereum Foundation's most difficult year, when funds were nearly exhausted, Wanxiang stepped in to help, purchasing 410,000 ETH (a total of $500,000) at an average price of $1.2. This investment was described by Vitalik as "saving the Foundation's life." Since then, Wanxiang has continued to promote the development of the Ethereum ecosystem in China, becoming its key Eastern ally.
• Zak Cole and "ETH 10,000": Faced with the persistently low ETH price since 2024, Ethereum core developer Zak Cole launched the Ethereum Community Foundation (ECF) with the resounding slogan of "Pushing ETH to $10,000." The ECF is dedicated to funding tokenless infrastructure projects that directly enhance the economic value of ETH, representing a powerful, asset-focused new force within the community.

Division and Coexistence: Towards the Next Decade

From the splits and reunions of its eight founders to a global decentralized community of thousands of developers, researchers, and enthusiasts, Ethereum's decade is an epic story of collaboration, conflict, division, and rebirth. The founding team's splits did not weaken the ecosystem; instead, they gave rise to competing projects like Cardano and Polkadot.

Ten years is just the beginning. The road ahead is still long, filled with challenges and opportunities. But as long as the lights of the community remain burning, this "world computer" will continue to run forever, continuing to write the legend of the next decade.