10 Lesser-Known Facts About Ethereum on Its 10th Birthday

10 Lesser-Known Facts About Ethereum on Its 10th Birthday

Today marks a major milestone in crypto history:

Ethereum turns 10.

Since its launch on July 30, 2015, Ethereum has grown from an experimental idea in a whitepaper to the backbone of Web3. It powers decentralized finance, NFTs, DAOs, real-world assets, Layer 2 solutions, and more. But beyond the mainstream narratives lies a deeper history filled with lesser-known facts that helped shape the Ethereum we know today.

To celebrate its tenth birthday, we made a list of 10 things you might not know about Ethereum.

1. Ethereum was crowdfunded
   
   

   In 2014, Ethereum raised over 31,000 BTC through a public presale. That was worth around 18 million US dollars at the time. This set the blueprint for how token launches would evolve in the years to come.



2. The first Ethereum block reward was 5 ETH
   
   

   Ethereum originally rewarded miners with 5 ETH per block. This number decreased over time and eventually reached zero after the network transitioned to proof of stake through the Merge in 2022.



3. The DAO hack led to Ethereum’s only major chain split
   
   

   In 2016, a vulnerability in The DAO smart contract led to the theft of 3.6 million ETH. The Ethereum community voted to reverse the hack through a hard fork. This controversial decision created a split - Ethereum continued with the reversed chain, while a minority stuck to the original, which became Ethereum Classic.



4. Gavin Wood coined the term Web3
   
   

   Gavin Wood was Ethereum’s cofounder and its first chief technology officer. He also authored the Ethereum Yellow Paper, which defined the technical design of the protocol. Later, he went on to found Polkadot and introduced the vision of Web3 as a decentralized internet.



5. Ethereum burns part of its transaction fees
   
   

   Since the London Upgrade in 2021, Ethereum introduced a fee structure called EIP-1559. Part of every transaction fee is now burned, permanently reducing the total supply of ETH. So far, over 4 million ETH has been burned.



6. Vitalik Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship
   
   

   In 2014, Vitalik was awarded 100,000 US dollars by the Thiel Fellowship to work on Ethereum full time. He left university to build what would become the most used smart contract platform in the world.



7. Ethereum does not have a supply cap
   
   

   Unlike Bitcoin’s 21 million limit, Ethereum was never designed with a fixed maximum supply. But since the Merge and fee-burning began, Ethereum has often become deflationary during times of high network usage.



8. Ethereum almost had a different name
   
   

   Vitalik explored other names such as Stratum and Aether before settling on Ethereum. He found the word on Wikipedia and liked its sci-fi and futuristic sound.



9. CryptoKitties once jammed the entire Ethereum network
   
   

   In 2017, a digital collectible game called CryptoKitties became so popular that it congested Ethereum to the point where transactions slowed dramatically. It was an early stress test for Ethereum and revealed the need for scaling solutions.



10. The first tokenized real estate asset on Ethereum was sold in 2017
    
    

    One of the earliest examples of real estate on the blockchain happened when a Kyiv apartment was tokenized and sold using an Ethereum smart contract. This marked the beginning of on-chain real-world assets.

So there you have it. Ten years, ten facts.

Did you learn something new today?