From on-chain experiments to capitalization: Ethereum's 10th year knocks on Wall Street
It appears that to coincide with this significant 10th anniversary, ETH is rushing back at $4000.
From the launch of the main network on July 30, 2015 to today in 2025, it has not only witnessed the rise and fall of the entire blockchain industry, but has also used upgrades and consensus time after time to build an unprecedented “world computer”. Smart contracts, once frowned upon, are now the most common operating system in the Web3 world. ETH has also gone from a few cents at the time of crowdfunding to a large asset with a market capitalization of over $300 billion.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation has also completed an important “blood exchange.” The inside is changing, and so is the outside. Over the past year, a number of companies with traditional financial backgrounds have successively bought ETH, and institutions such as SharpLink, BTCS, and BMNR have announced the inclusion of ETH in strategic asset reserves.
All of these changes took place in this special year: 2025, ten full years since the Ethereum mainnet went live.
This decade has been one of the most exciting chapters in blockchain history. From a white paper to a global ecosystem of hundreds of billions of dollars; from the founding team of the “Eight Kings Assembly” to breaking through silos in the siege of “Ethereum Killers”; from PoW to PoS, from technical laboratories to public infrastructure, Ethereum has completed its first reincarnation.
But the real story is probably just beginning.
Ethereum's “prequel”
The focus of this phase was the split and ideological conflict of the Ethereum founding team, which took place during the period 2014-2015. Vitalik Buterin, a programmer genius who always makes fun of technology, always answers “the 8 co-founders thing” when asked what his biggest regret during his Ethereum journey was. Obviously, these 8 founders, who have long since left, are on his mind.
When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he greeted the top 10 developers who responded and chose 5 of them as leaders, namely the 5 founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit.
“This was clearly a very bad decision. They looked like nice people, and they wanted to help, so I thought at the time, why not let them be leaders?” Vitalik said this when he looked back on his decision at the time.
Regarding the co-founder of Ethereum, this is a controversial topic. There are many versions on the internet, and even Wikipedia's related entries are constantly being edited and revised. After Vitalik “personally certified 8 co-creators,” the version widely recognized by the community was: Following the 5 founders, 3 other developers became co-founders in 2014: Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke.
At this point, Ethereum has completed the early formation of 8 core leaders, like the “Eight Kings Council” in the early Yuan and Qing Dynasties to prevent the Emperor (Big Khan) from arbitrarily implementing it.
Berlin “Pilgrimage”
In the “Vitalik: An Ethereum Story” documentary released last year, Vitalik recalled that he was a digital nomad since mid-2013.
That was the prehistory of Ethereum. Bitcoin was only $204, more than a year since Vitalik and Mihai Alisie founded Bitcoin Magazine. While building Ethereum, he ran all over the world because he was invited by various communities around the world. In 2013 and 2014, Ethereum had headquarters in Switzerland and Berlin, the white paper came out, and Vitalik visited China to crowdfund Ethereum and visit miners.
Berlin is the city he's been waiting for a long time.
“Pilgrimage,” Vitalik described himself active in Berlin's Bitcoin Kiez area at the time. Cryptocurrency payments are very common in Berlin's Bitcoin Kiez region. Within about a few hundred meters, there are more than a dozen stores that accept BTC payments. The “Room 77” dining bar in the heart of the community is also a community center, frequented by technology developers, political activists, etc.
Room 77 餐吧，Vitalik Buterin 摄于 2013 年，现已关闭
Near this area, Ethereum has rented an office, only 1.5 km from the “Room 77” dining bar, and Vitalik can be reached in less than 20 minutes on foot. Now search for the Ethereum office address “Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin” on Google Maps, and you can also see that this address is labeled Ethereum Network Launch (30/07/2015) and a group photo of the early members of the Ethereum core at the time.
At the beginning of 2014, most of Ethereum's core members were mostly close to Vitalik, and the Ethereum team was in a highly cohesive state.
At the Miami Bitcoin Conference in January of that year, Vitalik and his co-founders stood together for the first time to present their project to the world. The results were good, and Ethereum officially entered the public eye. However, this was also the night before separation.
2014 年 1 月在迈阿密举行的第一次以太坊聚会，图源网络
The division of Switzerland
The whole of 2014 was not that ordinary for the coin industry. The theft and bankruptcy of Mentougou caused the price of Bitcoin to drop severely, from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a drop of 67%. Also this year, CZ sold her Shanghai home and became OK CTO for $600 in Stud Bitcoin. SBF, who just graduated from MIT, is applying for a resume on Wall Street.
For Ethereum, 2014 was an even more important year. The encrypted version of “The Eight Fairies of Silicon Valley” was staged. The division of this conference determined the future direction of Ethereum.
June 7, 2014. All members of the Ethereum leadership attended an internal meeting in Switzerland, where discussions focused on the future direction of Ethereum. Switzerland's Spaceship House, the venue for the conference was chosen here. This is the birthplace of ETH, and also Ethereum's first headquarters.
Spaceship house，图源：Mihai Alisie
In fact, prior to this meeting, this topic had already been debated internally for a long time, and even spawned factional divisions long ago. The relationship within Ethereum became strained. “Is it taking venture capital funds, or is it crowdfunding from all ordinary people; is it going the profitable route and becoming a cryptographic Google, or is it a pure non-profit organization?” It became an ongoing debate.
While recalling this memory, Vitalik said, “I was once persuaded to move Ethereum towards a more enterprise path. But this thing has never made me more comfortable, even a little dirty.”
The meeting to decide on the “life and death” of Ethereum was said to have lasted all day, and Vitalik's decision was to choose the decentralized and non-profit route. “I tried to shirk responsibility the whole time because I really didn't want to take responsibility, and eventually I had to get rid of some people.”
This decision became the first turning point in Ethereum's history and directly led to the team's first major split.
Charles Hoskinson is the most obvious opponent of this conflict. He has always argued that Ethereum should become a commercialized company, receive capital through venture capital, and later develop into a profitable technology giant. “A horizontal power structure where cleaners and senior management would be in the same position is just crazy.”
After leaving Ethereum, Charles founded the development company IOHK (later restructured as a venture capital studio) and launched Cardano, a Pos public chain. This has been a leading copycat for many years. It is known as “Japanese Ethereum” because of its early focus on the Japanese market. It is also a first-generation “Ethereum killer”, and is the top ten crypto market capitalization all year round.
Following Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided not to participate in core development and switched to founding the incubator ConsenSys. In 2022, he completed Series D financing of US$450 million with a valuation of 7 billion US dollars. The financiers included top VCs such as ParaFi Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund Phase II, and Microsoft. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated a number of blockchain startups and built a number of rich ecosystem projects for Ethereum. The most successful was MetaMask, the plug-in wallet Little Fox, which is the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, with a weekly revenue of 300,000 US dollars, with a total revenue of nearly 300 million US dollars.
Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second generation with a strong family. The reason he participated in Ethereum was to make more money. As a result, after Ethereum established a non-profit operating model, Anthony began to gradually retreat to the second tier, was in a semi-exit state, created Decentral, developed the Jaxx digital wallet, and finally decided to leave Ethereum in December 2015. The 2018 Forbes list estimated his net worth at $750 million to $1 billion, making him one of the top 20 richest people in the cryptocurrency sector. However, in 2021, he announced that he decided to “clear the warehouse” based on personal safety considerations, no longer fund any blockchain projects, and plan to engage in charity and other causes in the future.
Amir Chetrit, on the other hand, left the Swiss conference due to lack of investment in Ethereum and was criticized by other developers and founders, and later joined other industries because he had always been anonymous and focused on privacy protection, and his information was scarce.
When the dust settled at the end of 2014, only four of the original eight co-founders remained with the team: Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie, and Jeffrey Wilcke.
Vitalik also reflected that he was too hasty in selecting the team and failed to take into account the deep differences, conflicts of ideas, and clash of interests among the members, which was far more complicated than he had initially anticipated. “I really realized then that people in the cryptocurrency sector aren't all striving for ideals like me; a lot of people really just want to make a lot of money. Relationships between people are a real problem.”
The work continues, and the work of Vitalik and the others left behind continues. Fortunately for Vitalik, the foundation was taking over more jobs at the time, and his most important technology partner, Gavin Wood, was still working side by side with him.
Stumbling Foundation
July 30, 2015 is the historic moment when the Ethereum mainnet went live.
Some of the early members gathered around the Berlin office to witness the automatic launch of Ethereum after 1028,201 blocks. A very historic photograph documenting some of the core members at the time. Vitalik's peers include several core developers worth mentioning, including:
Gustav Simonsson was an early security advisor to Ethereum and played a critical role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity to continue his career in the decentralized computing network field.
Christian Reitwiessner is the developer of the Solidity programming language and provides the foundation for running smart contracts on Ethereum.
Liana Husikyan is also an important member of the Solidity development team. She is one of the main developers of Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment for writing and deploying smart contracts, helping to simplify the smart contract development process.
Meanwhile, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it and one of the founders of The DAO. Although a security breach led to a fork in 2016, The DAO is still one of the most important experiments in blockchain history, driving the exploration of decentralized governance models.
Additionally, there are Fabian Vogelsteller, author of ERC 20 and ERC 725, Vlad Zamfir, who drove Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake, and Jutta Steiner, head of security at the Ethereum Foundation (who later became CEO of Parity Technologies founded by Gavin).
At the same time, there is another detail in this photo that I always enjoy: Vitalik is hiding in the corner of the photo and half of his face is blocked, while his most important technical partner Gavin Wood is in the middle of the picture, more like an honest CEO.
In some past photos, we can also see the close partnership between Vitalik and Gavin. However, no one expected that the leader of the Ethereum engineering team and the author of the Ethereum Yellow Book would be the next to leave.
2014 年 11 月 28 日，以太坊柏林办公室举办了 DEVCON 第 0 次开发者会议，大部分成员都聚集到了柏林，此前大家都是通过 Skype 进行交流，这是第一次见面。会议留下的照片里，Vitalik 和 Gavin 两人一如既往地搂在一起
Just 3 months after the mainnet went live, Gavin Wood chose to leave. He believes that Ethereum's need for a more centralized engineering management model would be more efficient. However, Vitalik once again said “NO.” Huge differences eventually prompted Gavin to leave the team and start his own company, Parity (Ethcore). Parity soon became an important node operator on the Ethereum network, once controlling more than 40% of the network's nodes. Since then, Gavin has fully promoted the development of Polkadot, which has been one of Ethereum's key competitors for a long time.
Gavin's departure directly curtailed Ethereum's ability to implement engineering, and his leadership and technical expertise were critical in the early development of Ethereum. As he left, the team's efficiency issues gradually came to light. Ethereum's Geth client developers are distributed around the world, and team management and coordination issues occur frequently, and development progress is affected as a result.
Vitalik、Jeff、Gavin，图源：Vitalik
However, after Gavin left, the only two remaining co-creators Mihai Alisie and Jeffrey Wilcke left one after another during this period.
Mihai Alisie was one of Vitalik's earliest partners. The two co-founded “Bitcoin Magazine”. He helped set up the legal framework for Ethereum in Switzerland and served as the foundation's vice chairman. Mihai's departure came naturally; he didn't have a violent conflict with the team, but the core strength of Ethereum's early construction was further reduced.
Jeffrey Wilcke's gradual exit was after The Dao had a huge amount of ETH stolen by hackers and forked Ethereum, and handed over the development work and technical supervision of the Ethereum Go client Geth to his assistant Péter Szilágyi. He turned his energy to game development and spending time with his family, probably in March 2018.
Jeffrey Wilcke 照顾自己的孩子，图源网络
With the departure of these founding members, Vitalik's loneliness in Ethereum is increasing day by day. Some developers revealed that 2015 was a lonely and difficult year for Vitalik, who often spent the night in his Berlin office.
First Generation Foundation
When it was first created, many members of the Ethereum Foundation were temporarily appointed by the top. For example, Kelley Becker and Frithjof Weinert served for a short time as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of the Ethereum Foundation, responsible for the daily operation and financial management of the Foundation to ensure that the Foundation has sufficient funds to support the development and operation of Ethereum. However, their tenure was short, and they soon left the Foundation.
In 2015, while Ethereum was hiring on a large scale, the Foundation also took over more jobs, and the core Ethereum developers were included in the Ethereum Foundation's research team.
Until April 10, 2015, the Ethereum Foundation began to have its own organizational structure, began board selection, and operations gradually got on the right track. In mid-2015, Ming Chan, who has many years of experience in IT and management consulting, was appointed as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation to handle the Foundation's daily operations, manage it in a standardized manner, and ensure that technology development and community operations proceed smoothly under the legal and regulatory framework.
The Foundation's internal structure has also been further clarified. In addition to Vitalik remaining a central figure in technology and community, Lars Klawitter, Vadim Levitin, and Wayne Hennessy-Barrett have joined the Foundation's board of directors.
Lars Klawitter is responsible for the integration of technology and innovation in the foundation. He was active as an entrepreneur during the Internet revolution in his early years and was the head of the innovation business for Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. Vadim Levitin, on the other hand, is a technical expert with extensive international experience who has worked for the United Nations to help the Ethereum Foundation expand its influence on a global scale. Wayne Hennessy-Barrett, another board member who brings a global perspective to the Foundation, has extensive operating experience in emerging markets in Africa.
With the addition of these new members, the Ethereum Foundation gradually improved its governance structure, and the Foundation's core mission gradually changed from technology development to community coordination and resource allocation.
At the time, the foundation also held a large amount of ETH assets and supported the development of the Ethereum ecosystem by funding various research projects and developer teams.
Second Generation Foundation
In 2018, the coin industry experienced the ICO explosion and 94 major falls, beginning the “year of regulatory liquidation” of cryptocurrencies. The price of Bitcoin fell from a maximum of $19870 to a minimum of around $3,000, and Binance quickly became the world's largest trading platform. Solana, the “killer of Ethereum,” which focuses on high performance, efficiency, and high throughput, is still 2 years away.
However, when people talk about Ethereum, they basically mention two things: one is the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, and the other is that the Ethereum Foundation is selling coins again.
The supply of ETH controlled by the foundation has been declining over the years, and community members have shown too much negative sentiment. However, some members of the Ethereum Foundation said that this is one of the signs that the foundation intends to decentralize. “It is a good thing that EF consciously wants to reduce its influence and role.”
Indeed, since Aya Miyaguchi (Miyaguchi Reiko) succeeded Ming Chan as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation in 2018, the Foundation is no longer the central hub for all development work as it was initially, but has moved more towards supporting and coordinating communication and collaboration between different projects, and expanding the Foundation's collaboration with external partners, such as ConsenSys.
After Aya Miyaguchi took office, EF's division of responsibilities became more clear, mainly limited to:
1. Host Devcon or Devconnect once a year;
2. Maintain an execution client Geth, but do not maintain any consensus client;
3. Providing tens of millions of dollars of untied funding to the wider community every year;
4. Host conference calls: such as All Core Devs (ACD) hosted by Tim Beiko, All Devs Consensus (ACDC) hosted by Alex Stokes, etc.;
5. Conduct research: This may be one of the departments that are still centralized, but it is possible that some EF research teams will be independent;
6. Roadmap development: Vitalik updated the roadmap diagram, and dozens of tasks were developed in parallel by different teams;
The Ethereum Foundation's official website currently lists only three leadership members. In addition to Aya Miyaguchi and Vitalik, there is also a board member Patrick Storchenegger.
During this period, several next-generation core developers in the Ethereum Foundation gradually emerged and became key players in Ethereum 2.0 and the entire ecosystem. Here is a list of people I personally think are important in Ethereum, including: Danny Rya, Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, Dankrad Feist, Christian Rwitqiessner, and Péter Szilágyi, creators of Solidity. (In my opinion, there is no specific order, and there is no breakdown of them all)
Danny Ryan is a core member of the Ethereum 2.0 team and is known by the community as the “Chief Engineer of Ethereum 2.0”. He played a critical role in coordinating the development process of Ethereum 2.0, particularly during the launch and merger upgrade of the beacon chain, and was the first Ethereum Foundation researcher to appear in the documentary “Vitalik: An Ethereum Story.”
Since joining the Ethereum Foundation in 2017, Justin Drake's main work has also been Ethereum's transformation to Proof of Stake (PoS), and has played a key role in the execution of the ETH merger. Additionally, Justin Drake is one of the main speakers in the community on Ethereum's future technology roadmap. He often participates in podcasts and interviews to educate the public, such as the Ethereum Foundation's Reddit AMA. Justin Drake is also one of several key speakers and has a very good foundation in the community.
Tim Beiko joined the Ethereum Foundation full time in 2018 and became one of the core developer leaders in 2021. He is responsible for organizing the ACD conference call and is an important bridge between core Ethereum developers. As a protocol engineer, his work covered advancing several Ethereum improvement proposals.
Dankrad Feist is a key researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on research on statelessness (statelessness) and data availability (Data Availability) issues. The “Danksharding” concept he proposed was in Ethereum's sharding technology route, so the last expansion plan chosen for the Ethereum main network was Dankrad Feist, named after himself. At the same time, his research on the MEV (maximum extractable value) issue also provided new insights into the security of Ethereum; however, he had a public dispute with Péter Szilágyi, the current development leader of Geth, and eventually forced Vitalik to mediate.
After stabilizing team members, the expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem gained mainstream recognition from 2018 to 2022. In 2019, DEXs such as Uniswap, Compound, and SushiSwap provided generous yields for any DeFi user providing liquidity, and DeFi Summer made Ethereum's TVL grow rapidly. In 2021, the “first century of the metaverse,” Facebook changed its name to Meta, paving the way for the explosion of NFTs. In 2022, the coin industry experienced a “Lehman moment”. Luna and FTX fell one after another, and the Solana ecosystem was heavily hammered, while Ethereum successfully switched from PoW to PoS. The Layer 2 circuit was booming and full of scenery for a moment, completing its own explosive period.
“Midlife crisis”
However, the month is full of profits and losses, and water overflows; everything prospers extremely; things are extremely counterproductive. Yin and Yang are transformed, and profits and losses grow. In 2024, Ethereum finally faced its own “midlife crisis,” and the price of the currency stagnated.
2024 is also an important year, the 10th anniversary of the ICO. The 10-year-old Apple almost went bankrupt, with a maximum market capitalization of only $20 billion. Microsoft's market capitalization grew from $6.7 billion to $130 billion in the decade since it went public. The market capitalization of Ethereum is $321 billion. Although in terms of market capitalization growth over the past 10 years, Ethereum has performed more rapidly than almost all current tech giants, and it was even thought that it would surpass Bitcoin at one point.
However, there is a rule in the financial world that when an asset reaches 300 billion or 500 billion US dollars, it faces a “growth bottleneck.” As the world's 34th largest asset, ETH's market capitalization is $321 billion, which is within a “growth bottleneck.” The “car” is too heavy and the “store” is too scattered. At this scale, it is very difficult for Ethereum to grow, almost fighting against “gravity.”
Ethereum stagnated, yet Bitcoin repeatedly reached new highs, and Solana “died after death.” No one can tell the full story of the problems and stories that the Ethereum Foundation had at the time in three words or two. But what we all know is that the low performance of the ETH price has kept Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation on the cusp for the past two years.
As a decentralized non-profit organization, it's not easy to handle Ethereum's internal organizational structure. Looking back at Ethereum along the way, the eight founding teams didn't match their “separation” philosophy and staged a cryptographic version of “The Eight Fairies of Silicon Valley.” Now, against the backdrop of a stagnant rise in currency prices, community dissatisfaction has fallen into a cyclical cycle of anger, which erupts every now and then, and the community's plot of mocking ETH prices has been updated wave after wave. Even complex relationships and ideological conflicts within the Ethereum Foundation continue. It is common for researchers to spoil each other, and it is also common for Vitalik to be scolded.
Other than Vitalik, there was someone else who felt really bad. That is Aya Miyaguchi (Miyaguchi Reiko), the former executive director of the Ethereum Foundation.
Over the past year, Aya has received a lot of criticism from the Ethereum community, and is a controversial character in both the Chinese and English regions of Ethereum.
Over the past year, Solana, the biggest killer of Ethereum, has come to life. In addition to founder Toly's efforts as a platform for various “Solana casino culture memes,” the work of Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu has also been recognized by the community. For example, she proposed the PayFi concept of “using on-chain staking interest-bearing real transactions under the payment chain”, held many high-quality hackathons, and invested in many high-quality projects in the Solana ecosystem.
However, in the eyes of many people in the Ethereum community, Aya has had almost no “results” in her 7 years as the Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation.
“Being hired for an unqualified job for 7 years and getting paid without doing any work”, traders and KOLs, led by CoinMamba, in the English community hate her the most.
They even tried to get Aya to leave through pressure from public opinion: “The day Aya left was Ethereum's Liberation Day,” “ETH will reach a new high within two weeks of Aya's departure,” and “if we continue to put pressure on her, she will quit.” Some people even made irrational abuse and death threats against her.
If you remember Vitalik's aggressive tweets during the Lunar New Year period, such as copying Milady's abstract terms, or even thinking about leaving the “good state of mind” speech period such as Ethereum, it was during that time that Vitalik was greatly pressured by public opinion from the community.
Third Generation Foundation
It wasn't until March 2025 that the Ethereum Foundation finally announced a major change in leadership: Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi stepped down from day-to-day management responsibilities to become the foundation's chairman. Two new co-executive directors will take over from Aya's original positions — Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak.
Hsiao-Wei Wang started out as a back-end engineer and came into contact with blockchain by accident in 2016. At the time, Vitalik was looking for contributors interested in Ethereum research, and Hsiao-Wei took the initiative to successfully apply to join and become one of the core developers.
This blockchain pioneer from Taiwan has been focusing on core research on Ethereum for 7 years and has made significant contributions in the field of sharding (sharding) and the Beacon Chain. Sharding technology is a key upgrade in solving Ethereum's scalability problems. It significantly increases network throughput and makes Ethereum more efficient and smooth when processing large numbers of transactions. In addition, she has also been responsible for the review and proof of concept (PoC) development of the Ethereum protocol for a long time, laying a solid technical foundation for the advancement of Ethereum 2.0 (or Eth2).
Despite being deeply involved in the field of technology for many years, Hsiao-Wei did not limit himself to the world of code, but was actively involved in community building. She often represents the Ethereum Foundation and organizes various technical conferences, especially in Taiwan. She has planned and promoted many high-quality Ethereum technology exchange events, successfully building a bridge between local developers and the global Ethereum ecosystem. For example, at the 2018 Ethereum Sharding Workshop Taipei (Ethereum Sharding Workshop Taipei), she was also at the center of technical discussions as an organizer.
2018 年台北以太坊碎片研讨会 Hsiao-Wei Wang 居 C 位
Tomasz Stańczak, another co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. As the founder of Nethermind, he is not only one of Ethereum's core developers, but has also conducted in-depth research in key areas such as MEV (maximum extractable value) and PBS (proponer-builder separation).
Prior to entering the blockchain field, Tomasz was a financial market engineer with extensive technical experience. In 2017, he officially joined the Ethereum development team as a core developer, an early team member of FlashBots, and a board member of the Starknet Foundation.
After that, he also founded Nethermind, one of the most important execution clients for Ethereum today. Nethermind started out as an experimental project, but under Tomasz's leadership, it quickly grew into one of the most important infrastructures in the Ethereum ecosystem, along with Geth, Besu, and Erigon as one of the top five execution clients. Compared to Geth's historical accumulation, Nethermind has attracted more and more developers and institutional users with its efficient code architecture, flexible customization, and strong enterprise-level support.
Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak were appointed as new co-executive directors, and the return of former EF researcher Danny Ryan was also met with cheers from the community.
As mentioned earlier, Danny Ryan is a core member of the Ethereum 2.0 team and is known by the community as the “Chief Engineer of Ethereum 2.0”. He played a critical role in coordinating the development process of Ethereum 2.0, especially during the launch, merger and upgrade of the beacon chain, and as the first Ethereum Foundation researcher to appear in the documentary “Vitalik: An Ethereum Story”, and was the first Ethereum Foundation researcher to appear in the documentary “Vitalik: An Ethereum Story”, and in an unofficial Ether community vote, Danny Ryan was Selected as the best person to serve as EF's sole leader. On September 13, 2024, it was announced that it would indefinitely withdraw from Ethereum development due to personal reasons, ending a seven-year career in Ethereum development. In March of this year, Danny Ryan announced his return to the Ethereum ecosystem as a co-creator of Etherealize, an institutional-level marketing and product division of the Ethereum ecosystem.
The truth about changing the estate
The story of Huanzhuang was already going viral in 2024. After the Hong Kong conference, there was even an anecdote about the “exchange of Ethereum underground garages”.
The data on the chain can smell the telltale signs. December 2024 to April 2025 was a period of free fall in the price of Ethereum, but it was also a time when the Huffindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) quietly turned its head upward.
图源为 Glassnode
HHI is an indicator that measures the concentration of assets. On the Ethereum chain, it represents the trend of chip ownership. At the same time as the price has plummeted, HHI is rising rapidly, indicating that ETH is not being generally sold off by the market; on the contrary, it is being concentrated from scattered retail investors to a few large households or even institutional addresses.
In addition to data and trends, what is more obvious is that in a new round of growth led by the crypto strategic reserve narrative led by MicroStrategy, listed companies that play the role of ETH strategic reserves are also common.
In May 2025, SharpLink Gaming ($SBET) announced a 425 million USD financing through PIPE to purchase 176,271 ETH, which had a market capitalization of over $450 million at the time.
In June, BitMine Immersion Technologies ($BMNR) announced that it would purchase ETH through PIPE financing of $250 million, clearly “transforming into an ETH infrastructure asset manager.” After the news was released, BMNR skyrocketed for many consecutive days, becoming another “ETH concept stock” after SBET.
Unlike SBET, BMNR is no longer just about “buying coins and coins,” but clearly targets ETH staking earnings, on-chain cash flow, and participation in the DeFi ecosystem. This is the first time that traditional mining companies have transformed into more ETH using “ETF-like logic”. It also shows that bookmakers' mentality has changed from directional betting to structural capture.
Almost at the same time, BTCS ($BTCS). Instead of making a high-profile announcement about how much ETH it bought in one go, it emphasized the innovative nature of the financing structure: the “DeFi+TradFi” hybrid financing model. It's buying more than just ETH, but an asset that is anchored in stablecoin liquidity.
Bit Digital ($BTBT) also quietly revealed that it has purchased 20,000 ETH and plans to switch from an original BTC mining company to an ETH staking node operator. In this rotation, some players in the BTC camp have already begun to stand on the other side.
From SBET's first launch to the succession of US stocks and mining companies such as BMNR, BTCS, and BTBT, the whole process took less than a month, and the pace was rapid, clear and orderly.
It is also worth noting that currently the largest individual shareholder disclosed by SBET, the largest ETH strategic reserve company, is not someone else; it is Joseph Lubin, one of the eight co-founders of Ethereum. As mentioned earlier, he founded ConsenSys after leaving Ethereum due to different ideas. Joseph Lubin himself not only holds a large amount of Ethereum, but after investing in SharpLink, he became the chairman of its board of directors and held 9.9% of SBET's shares.
Interestingly, at the ETHCC7 conference in Brussels in July 2024, after Vitalik's speech, Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, and Gavin Wood, the three former core founders of Ethereum, completed a group photo of the century, which is considered a decent end and reconciliation to the “break-up” of the past.
Ethereum without Vitalik
In Vitalik's father's recollection, when Ethereum was first established, Vitalik didn't want to lead; more thought was, “Hey, I came up with a cool idea, let me write it down first, then maybe some smart and influential people will do something about it.”
But then things changed a bit, and a lot of people joined the project, and they told Vitalik, “You are the one who should drive this project.” As a result, people promoted him to the position of leader, but none of this came naturally; for him, this was outside his comfort zone, and this is still one of the biggest challenges he faces.
“Vitalik has almost perfectly satisfied our society's deepening image of the founder of technology, the cult of youth, and obsessive fascination with a kind of innocence yet powerful.” As Nathan Schneider, an economics professor at Vitalik who has been interviewed many times, said.
But in 2025, Vitalik turned 31.
While working as Zuzalu in Montenegro, he saw someone ten years younger than him in leading roles on various projects, as organizers or developers; at a hacker party of around 30 people in Korea, he first became the oldest person in the room.
Vitalik has satisfied the imagination of a large number of programmers of their ideal self, young and legendary. Vitalik is a symbol; no longer young, he's no longer fit to play such a role, and he himself is aware of this.
Ten years ago, he wanted to do something cool, and many people praised him as one of the world-changing, amazing, young prodigy like Zuckerberg. Now, after experiencing the changes of the crypto age, the Russian-Ukrainian war, survival and death, Vitalik has a new sense: “I am playing a completely different role now, and it is time for the next generation to take over the mantle that once belonged to me.”
“I'm curious if Ethereum would survive without Vitalik's leadership?” Previously, a related discussion post received a lot of discussion on Ethereum's reddit: “Vitalik really didn't lead Ethereum as much as people think in the past few years”, “I've even heard that Vitalik isn't even the best person to explain the Ethereum roadmap.”
Marcocastignoli, who works at the Ethereum Foundation, also expressed her own personal opinion: “Although I'm not one of them, I know very well that Vitalik is just a member of the EF research team. The research team is made up of a group of too smart brains, and Vitalik is just average among them”
Several of the new core members mentioned earlier have gradually emerged as core developers in the Ethereum community.
Furthermore, according to Electric Capital statistics, there are currently 99 active Ethereum core developers. This figure is far ahead of other blockchain projects such as Bitcoin, Cardano, EOS, or Tron. Looking more broadly, the Ethereum network currently has more than 250,000 developers and researchers, making it one of the most decentralized blockchain development communities.
When young Vitalik was abandoned by Blizzard, he was able to use his technology to create a new world, as if everything was created by technology. And after going through these rounds of major shuffling of Ethereum team members, he discovered that he was finally powerless, and Vitalik's self began to be deconstructed from this point on.
As he wrote at the end of his 30-year-old vision of life: communities, ideologies, “scenes,” countries, or very small companies, families, or relationships — are all created by people.
It wasn't created by technology. Furthermore, Vitalik is no longer the youngest, smartest, or even the most representative roadmap technical researcher on Ethereum. Vitalik's role will continue to weaken, and one day, Ethereum will become Ethereum without Vitalik.
Maybe now is the time to imagine Ethereum without Vitalik.
Author's note: This article is an attempt to summarize changes in Ethereum's core organization membership, but the membership of Ethereum is much richer than I know, and putting them all in one article structure requires omitting many details, so there is a slight omission. Thanks to everyone who provided information and other feedback.
