At the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris in July this year, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, announced five long-term phases that the Ethereum developers are working on: The Merge, The Surge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge, which aim to improve the overall abilities of the network. On 24 August, the Ethereum Foundation published a blog post officially confirming that ‘The Merge’, a major milestone in Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake will be carried out in two phases starting from 6 September:
Bellatrix: The upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain — 11:34:47am UTC on 6 September 2022.
Paris: The terminal total difficulty value triggering The Merge is 58750000000000000000000.
Source: Ethereum Foundation Blog (2022)
Looking back at the development story of Ethereum, it is legendary. It heralded a new era of blockchain revolution and created an unprecedented prosperity in the blockchain world. The most exciting part is the birth of Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin, who was born in a family of distinguished mathematicians, started programming at the age of 4, learning Bitcoin at the age of 17, began to study abroad at the age of 19. In the same year, he published a paper. The topic is “Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralised Application Platform”. And this is how the legendary story came to be…
Jan 2014: Vitalik Buterin first introduced Ethereum to the world at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami, USA.
Apr 2014: Dr. Gavin Wood published the Ethereum Yellow Paper as a technical specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Jun 2014: The non-profit organisation Ethereum Foundation (Stiftung Ethereum) was established in Zug, Switzerland.
Jul 2014: Ethereum started a 42-day crowdfunding (Initial Coin Offering, from 22 July to 2 September). Among the initial distribution of Ethereum, 1 / ( 1 + 19.8% ) = 83.47% belongs to the participants in the crowdfunding. The remaining 16.53% was owned by the Ethereum Foundation. Only Bitcoin was accepted for the crowdfunding payment. In the first 14 days, every 1BTC was exchanged for 2,000 ETH. After that, the amount of ETH exchanged for 1BTC every day was reduced by 30, ceased to decrease after 1,337 ETH. The crowdfunding address received a total of 8,947 transactions from 8,893 unique addresses.
Source: Ethereum. Org
https://web.archive.org/web/20140701165441/https://www.ethereum.org/
Apr 2015: DEVgrants project launched. This project funded all contributions to the Ethereum platform and Ethereum-based projects.
July 2015: Ethereum went live (Ethereum Frontier release). At the same time, the project team distributed Ethereum to the crowdfunders.
Jan 2016: Ethereum smart contracts opened a new way for blockchain applications.
Mar 2016: Ethereum released Homestead, providing a graphical user interface wallet. Users can thus easily experience and use Ethereum.
Jul 2016: Ethereum hard forked in response to the hack of The DAO, a decentralised autonomous organisation.
Dec 2016: Ethereum released Metropolis, a relatively comprehensive interface designed for non-technical users, that is the release of the Mist browser.
Aug 2017: Vitalik Buterin proposed a Ethereum’s expansion plan — Plasma
Oct 2017: “Byzantium” upgrade.
Nov 2017: Vitalik Buterin announced Ethereum 2.0's roadmap.
Feb 2019: “Constantinople” and “St. Petersburg” upgrades.
Dec 2019: “Istanbul” upgrade.
Dec 2020: The Beacon Chain went live and allowed Proof-of-Stake staking.
In 2021, Berlin and London Hard Forks. Beacon Chain was upgraded to prepare for the network’s transition to Proof-of-Stake.
……
Today, ‘The Merge’ upgrade, which marks Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake, is about to happen and begins the journey of the Ethereum 2.0 era. We (MemoryDAO) will use a blockchain native way to commemorate this major milestone. We have gathered the core builders of the blockchain world to launch the commemorative NFT medal of ‘The Merge’ upgrade and will airdrop to all 8,893 addresses that participated in the genesis crowdfunding of Ethereum to commemorate the contributions of the pioneers to the birth of Ethereum. Their heroic deeds will be imprinted on Ethereum forever in the form of NFT. When ‘The Merge’ upgrade happens, the free mint of the commemorative NFT medal will also be launched. Let’s witness this history moment and create a decentralised future together!
This piece was originally published on the Medium page of EtherPOAP, which HashKey Group is a sponsor of.
About HashKey Group
HashKey Group is an end-to-end digital asset financial services group in Asia. The Group provides a complete ecosystem across the entire digital asset landscape, ranging from venture investment, to custody, to technologies and trading. HashKey’s senior team has extensive experience and expertise in investment, governance and technology gained from tier-one banks, regulators and Fintech ventures. By bringing together the most advanced blockchain research, development and technologies, HashKey identifies potential opportunities and delivers end-to-end solutions that operate within regulatory frameworks with the highest compliance standards. The Group has operations in Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, and extensive partnerships with FinTech and blockchain solutions providers, academic institutions and associations. Official Website: https://www.hashkey.com/
