According to U.Today, today marks nine years since the launch of Ethereum's main network. Enthusiasts celebrate this day as the birthday of one of the largest blockchains. Over the years, Ethereum has grown to become the biggest altcoin and the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. Currently, the market capitalization of ETH, the network's native currency, stands at $401 million, with the total value locked in the blockchain nearing $60 billion.
On this day in 2015, Stephan Tual, the former COO of the Ethereum Foundation, officially announced the network's rollout in a blog post. Tual envisioned Ethereum as a programmable, censorship-proof world computer. Today, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, shared his thoughts on the occasion, expressing his excitement for the future of the blockchain. Buterin congratulated Ethereum on its ninth birthday and looked forward to the developments in the next decade.
Ethereum continues to progress according to its roadmap, with several upgrades and proposals already implemented. The next significant milestones are the Verge and Purge upgrades. The Verge upgrade will introduce Verkle trees, enabling stateless clients and reducing the cost of running a node. This change is expected to increase the layer-1 gas limit tenfold, making transactions cheaper. The Purge upgrade aims to simplify the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) by removing certain features, thereby enhancing its efficiency.
