In 2014, a 20-year-old Russian boy came to Hangzhou, China alone. He gave away virtual currency on the street at an exhibition, 5,000 per person. He introduced his technology to everyone. Almost everyone thought he was a liar, and few people believed him.

Unexpectedly, a few years later, these 5,000 free coins were worth 150 million...

This coin is ETH Ethereum, and this guy is the famous vitalik, also known as V God!

You asked me what ETH is? I don’t know how to answer.

Is ETH a currency? A technology? A tool? Or the future of the world?

For me, ETH is a more legendary story, and this story is even more exciting than BTC!

1. The Path to Growth

At the age of 13-16, Vitalik was an internet-addicted teenager who loved the Warlock in World of Warcraft the most. However, Blizzard deleted one of Vitalik’s favorite skills due to an upgrade.

Vitalik was very angry to realize that all players on the Internet are vulnerable groups, which is a drawback of all centralized services.

From then on, Vitalik gave up World of Warcraft and kept thinking about whether there was any way to break the centralized model until he discovered Bitcoin at the age of 17.

Vitalik was deeply attracted by the decentralization of blockchain, but after a long period of understanding, he discovered the limitations of BTC and the huge market demand, so he created ETH.

2. The miracle begins

At the end of 2013, Vitalik Buterin published a paper titled "Ethereum: The Next Generation of Smart Contracts and Decentralized Application Platform"

Vitalik Buterin analyzed the design, advantages and disadvantages of the BTC system in detail, and explained in detail the role of ETH, on which various decentralized applications can be built!

Unexpectedly, this paper became a huge hit as soon as it was released, and received widespread praise from the BTC community. Some people even approached him to collaborate with Vitalik Buterin.

In May 2014, Vitalik Buterin came to China for the first time to explore the upcoming pre-sale of Ethereum.

During this trip to China, Vitalik visited many bigwigs and introduced Ethereum to them in detail. However, some people told him "you are a liar" and kicked him out.

In July 2014, Ethereum officially launched the crowdsale of Ether to raise funds. The entire fundraising process went very smoothly, and the Ethereum team successfully raised 31,000 bitcoins.

3. The birth of ETC

In 2016, the Ethereum community launched a project called “The DAO”

The DAO has become a target of hacker attacks with ulterior motives.

Due to a loophole in the contract, 3.6 million ETH were transferred away by hackers. This incident has caused people to have great doubts about the security of ETH.

In order to make up for the loss, Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation decided to hard fork and switch to a new chain to recover the previous losses. However, many miners insisted that the code could not be changed and insisted on mining on ETC.

So two completely different chains were created, namely ETC and ETH, but what was unexpected was that the forked ETC was also widely praised for a period of time, and countless people had bought it.

4. The rise of graphics cards

In 2017, with the advent of the bull market and more and more people using ETH, several mainstream domestic exchanges took the initiative to launch ETH transactions. Before that, no currency had been launched for many years. This shows the charm of ETH!

The rise of ETH has made many people discover business opportunities, because ETH can only be mined with graphics cards, which are essential hardware for computers and almost everyone has them. From then on, an era began when everyone wanted to mine.

The price of graphics cards also continued to rise, increasing several times. At that time, at least 9.5 out of 10 graphics cards sold were used for mining, and only half of them could be used for playing games.

5. Crazy ICO

ICO is crowdfunding. Using ETH can easily complete decentralized fundraising. Therefore, almost all projects in 2017 used ETH to raise funds, such as EOS and Qtum Chain, which generated a lot of wealth.

A lot of bubbles were created, and even an electronic pet on ETH could be hyped up to hundreds of thousands. It was not until September 4, 2017 that the country banned ICOs, and this feast gradually came to an end.

6. Fall from the altar

On March 12, 2020, as the bear market spread and the Federal Reserve's continuous circuit breakers caused the virtual currency market value to plummet, ETH also fell from $1,500 in the bull market to $87, which can only be described as horrible.

Many investors became extremely pessimistic about ETH, which led to them selling at a loss and leaving the market.

7. DeFi Explosion

DeFi is decentralized finance. Through code, you can pledge a certain amount of virtual currency to get new token dividends.

In September 2020, after the booming development of liquidity mining and aggregators, the total value locked (TVL) of DeFi protocols exceeded US$10 billion.

DeFi achieved more than 2000% growth in 2020, realizing a global ecosystem of open, trustless financial services hosted on the blockchain.

YFI, as a dividend coin, has increased by thousands or tens of thousands of times, which shows how crazy the market is. Most DeFis use ETH network staking, which also makes the entire system more and more prosperous.

8. The New King is Born

With the start of the 2021 bull market, ETH has risen all the way to $4,850, which is 16,000 times higher than the issue price.

All products linked to ETH have seen a significant price increase, with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Metaverse Land and millions of dollars worth of NFTs everywhere.

Created myths of one era after another.

9. The era of hair-stroking begins

With the successful conversion of ETH to POS and the success of some projects such as OP and ARB, many people have found a new way to get rich, which is to try out new projects in the unlaunched test network, and get token rewards when the project is launched.

Many people opened hundreds of new ETH addresses and made millions or even tens of millions of dollars by randomly interacting with them in the test network, which made countless people jealous. So many people rushed in like crazy and participated in the airdrop. Most of the projects used ETH as the basic token.

10. L2 Competition

Since the ETH main network has a high load, transfers are slow and expensive, everyone is developing a second-layer network, completing settlements on the second-layer network and then packaging and sending them to the main network to make huge profits.

As a result, a large number of L2 networks have been generated, such as: ARB, OP, ZKS, STRK, ZKEVM, LINEA, BASE... In the future, the story of the cryptocurrency circle will be the story of L2 hegemony. As for who will win and who will lose, we will see!

PS: If BTC is the currency of the cryptocurrency world, then ETH is undoubtedly more like the operating system of the cryptocurrency world, because most applications are built on ETH.