The Ethereum genesis block was first mined on the 30th of July 2015 after being in development for around 18 months. Since then, Ethereum has grown to become the most widely used public blockchain and ETH has become an extremely important economic asset with a market cap of over $150 billion.
The video above shows Ethereum addresses being born & interacting from the genesis block to today and to me it looks like the “big bang” of the Ethereum network. Once this bang went off and the network started chugging along there was no stopping it - Ethereum had been born and no one knew just how crazy this new platform would become.
Today, Ethereum is home to trillions of dollars of yearly economic activity happening across a wide range of verticals from DeFi to NFTs to DAOs and all the other buzzwords that we’ve all heard before. Though, the funny thing is that if you told someone pre-2020 that Ethereum network would be settling more value than the Bitcoin network they would’ve called you crazy. But it makes sense - Ethereum hosts hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of active smart contracts that all work together to produce this economic value.
Ethereum’s superpower really is in its composability - it’s the reason that DeFi has taken off and innovates so incredibly quickly. Every permissionless app on Ethereum can talk to every other permissionless app to create incredibly innovative products that all work seamlessly with eachother. Without this composability and the “money legos” that go along with it, DeFi would still look like a primitive toy and be much slower & clunkier. A clear example of this is “flash loans” which gives anyone in the world the ability to control a large amount of capital to do whatever they want with it as long as they pay the loan back in the same Ethereum block - this is only possible because of this composability.
At this point the Ethereum network has reached escape velocity and keeping up with everything happening on it is like trying to keep up with everything happening on the internet. I truly believe that it’s going to grow to become the worlds most decentralized, secure and valuable settlement layer with ETH sitting at the heart of the entire ecosystem as the best economic asset ever created. So strap in, enjoy the ride, and enjoy the price discovery now that ETH has hit its all time high again!
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
Join the Daily Gwei Ecosystem
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.