Ethereum at 6 - The Daily Gwei #302
Happy Ethday to you all!
As I’m sure you’re all well aware of by now, today is Ethereum’s 6th birthday! And what a 6 years it has been - from a group of budding hackers building Ethereum out of small offices to a $275 billion network that settles trillions in value annually - it’s safe to say that Ethereum has had one hell of a ride over the last 6 years.
Ethereum’s narratives have changed and improved dramatically over the years. In 2014, the Ethereum ICO was held where ETH could be bought with BTC for $0.30 and Ethereum didn’t really have a prevailing narrative. Though in 2015 this changed when Ethereum’s mainnet went live on July 30th and the prevailing narrative was that Ethereum would be a ‘world computer’ but still no one really knew exactly what this meant. Moving into 2016 and we had the infamous ‘The DAO’ event which was spectacular in both good and bad ways. 2017 was Ethereum’s first breakout year with it leading the bull market due to ICO mania (and a lot of hype around proof of stake). Then came 2018 which was a very sobering year for Ethereum - the price of ETH fell 94% and only a small group of people were around to carry the vision along. After a brutal 2018, sentiment around Ethereum in 2019 wasn’t much better but DeFi was really beginning to hit its stride - though overall I would say the prevailing sentiment in 2019’s was “just keep building”. Then in 2020 we quite literally had the year of DeFi on Ethereum marked by the launch of Compound’s liquidity mining program kicking off the infamous “DeFi summer”.
Now we’re in 2021 and Ethereum is a rocket ship that’s showing no signs of slowing down. The network is home to millions of users, thousands of developers, hundreds of apps and billions of dollars have been invested into the various verticals that live on top (DeFi, NFTs, DAOs etc). The ETH price has gone from $0.30 at the original ICO to $2,350 today - an astonishing 7833x return for those lucky few who held on the entire time. Ethereum also has a very strong social layer/community that consists of people from all around the world building, collaborating and investing in the futures of many different industries. This community is also setting the culture of Ethereum and ensuring that Ethereum remains the ‘Schelling point’ of the entire crypto movement.
On a personal level, Ethereum has changed my life in more ways than I could ever have imagined. While I haven’t been involved with Ethereum since the beginning (I joined in early 2017), I have now been around long enough to have experienced pretty much everything Ethereum has had to offer and I’m very excited to see what the future holds. I can’t think of any other industry I’d rather be a part of as Ethereum has given me the chance to witness and participate in the growth of world-changing technology (unfortunately I was too young to witness the early internet days).
In saying all of that, we’re still very early in Ethereum’s life and there’s plenty of opportunities to be had and work to do - so here’s to the next 6 years of Ethereum!
Have a great weekend everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.