Ethereum at 11: From the Genesis Block to Glamsterdam

TL;DR

• Ethereum mainnet produced its genesis block 11 years ago on July 30, 2015.
• The 2014 crowdsale raised roughly $18 million in BTC and distributed over 60 million ETH to contributors.
• Ethereum went through numerous updates: Homestead (March 2016), The Merge (September 2022), Shapella (April 2023), Dencun (March 2024), Pectra (May 2025), and Fusaka (December 2025).
• As of February 2026, over 50% of all ETH ever issued has passed through the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) deposit contract.
• The next hard fork, Glamsterdam, targets the second half of 2026 with ePBS and Block-Level Access Lists, supporting a gas limit increase from 60M toward 200M.
• Everstake has operated as an Ethereum validator way before The Merge in September 2022.

Where Ethereum Started: Vitalik Buterin and the 2014 Crowdsale

2026 marks Ethereum’s 11th year of operation, a stretch filled with milestones for the network and its community. Let’s revisit every major upgrade, event, and turning point the network and the wider industry have seen since.

Ethereum was conceived in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, then 19 years old, who proposed a blockchain with a general-purpose programming layer. The idea extended Bitcoin’s model beyond payments toward arbitrary smart contracts.

The crowdsale ran from July to September 2014 and raised approximately $18 million in BTC. It ranks among the largest crowdsales of its era and set the funding template the later projects copied.

Contributors received over 60 million ETH during that sale. The distribution seeded the initial holder base before any code ran on mainnet.

Why Vitalik Buterin Created Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum because he viewed Bitcoin technology even though promising, still too narrow, useful mainly for payments. He wanted a general-purpose platform that could run arbitrary programs without relying on centralized intermediaries.

Buterin’s father introduced him to Bitcoin in 2011, when he was 17, and he grew interested after early skepticism about a currency with no intrinsic value.

An anecdote he often repeats involves World of Warcraft, where the developer removed damage from a favorite spell. That moment showed him the downside of centralized control, and he has said he realized then what harm centralized services can bring.

Buterin received his first bitcoin for writing articles, often paid 5 BTC each, and co-founded Bitcoin Magazine with Mihai Alisie around 2011-2012. 

He studied computer science at the University of Waterloo and worked as a research assistant to cryptographer Ian Goldberg.

By 2013, crypto work consumed roughly 30 hours a week, so he left university and traveled to meet developers building “blockchain 2.0” projects on top of Bitcoin. He concluded most approaches were too narrow, bolting single features onto Bitcoin in constrained ways.

Buterin first argued that Bitcoin needed a richer scripting language for building applications. When that idea gained little traction, he chose to design a new platform with a Turing-complete language from the ground up.

A Turing-complete language would let one network support almost any computable application without a separate protocol for each use case:

• financial instruments,
• decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs),
• file storage,
• name registries,
• insurance,
• exchanges.

He has used the analogy that Bitcoin is a calculator while Ethereum is a smartphone. The design goal was a flexible foundation that others could build on freely.

Buterin wrote the Ethereum whitepaper in November 2013, at age 19, and circulated it to about a dozen contacts. Interest spread quickly, and he presented the idea publicly at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami in January 2014.

The name Ethereum came from “aether,” the old idea of a medium filling all space, which matched the vision of a universal platform underlying applications. A founding team formed, including Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Gavin Wood, and Joseph Lubin.

The team raised roughly 31,000 BTC, about $18 million at the time, through the 2014 crowdfunding campaign. The core driver was both technical and philosophical: Bitcoin proved decentralized digital money worked, and Buterin wanted a programmable platform to extend those ideas past currency.

Launch Day: The Genesis Block on July 30, 2015

Ethereum mainnet went live on July 30, 2015, when the founding team mined the genesis block. That event marked the formal birth of the network and the first production release, known as Frontier.

Frontier was a bare-bones environment aimed at developers and miners. It let the community begin working on a live chain across three tracks:

• building tools,
• running nodes,
• testing contracts.

Homestead: The First Real Upgrade

Homestead was activated in March 2016 as Ethereum’s first major post-launch upgrade. It moved the network out of its experimental Frontier phase toward a more stable footing.

The upgrade removed launch-era safeguards and adjusted protocol parameters. It signaled that Ethereum was ready for wider production use.

The DAO Fork: How the Network Survived Its Hardest Moment

In June 2016, an attacker exploited a vulnerability in The DAO smart contract and drained about 3.6 million ETH, worth roughly $50 million at the time. The incident tested whether a young decentralized network could respond to a crisis of that scale.

The exploit targeted The DAO’s splitDAO / withdraw logic. The flawed pattern was that the contract sent ETH to the caller before updating its internal balance ledger.

Starting June 17, 2016, the attacker looped this recursive withdrawal and siphoned ~3.6M ETH into a “child DAO” that mirrored The DAO’s structure. Critically, The DAO’s code imposed a 28-day holding period before funds in a split-off child DAO could be moved, so the stolen ETH was visible but frozen, buying the community time to respond.

The community voted for a hard fork to reverse the theft. However, the community did not reach the consensus, splitting the chain into two: today’s Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, which retained the original transaction history.

Those who voted for Ethereum Classic are the proponents of the idea that code is law and immutability of blockchain should not be disturbed.

Ethereum came through its hardest early moment through a community governance process. The split remains a widely cited case study in on-chain coordination.

The Merge: Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake

The Merge transitioned Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake at block 15,537,393 on September 15, 2022, in the upgrade known as Paris. It was the largest protocol change since Homestead, replacing the network’s entire consensus mechanism.

Why did Ethereum move to Proof-of-Stake?

• Ethereum’s energy consumption dropped by roughly 99.9%.
• ETH issuance fell sharply because the network no longer pays miners large block rewards. Combined with the fee-burning mechanism introduced earlier (EIP-1559), ETH became net-deflationary during periods of high network activity. 
• Proof of stake makes attacks expensive and more complicated for an attacker would need to acquire and stake an enormous amount of ETH, which is then slashable (destroyable) if they misbehave.

Ahead of the transition, over 400,000 validators had staked around 13 million ETH on the Beacon Chain. The switch retired miner-led block production in a single step. Now almost 41M ETH staked at the staking contract on Ethereum. 

The Merge event ran without downtime, and users needed to take no action. The chain continued producing blocks through the transition, and Everstake has operated as an Ethereum validator even before that day.

Shapella: Closing the Staking Loop

Shapella activated in April 2023 and let validators withdraw ETH that had been staked since The Merge. The upgrade completed the staking lifecycle by making deposits reversible.

Before Shapella, staked ETH stayed locked until withdrawals were enabled, a constraint that gave some participants pause. Enabling withdrawals reduced the uncertainty of staking, which increased participation. Before Shapella, many potential stakers worried they might never be able to get their Ether back, and cited possible delays or bugs as further risks.

Dencun: The Scalability Leap for Layer 2

By 2023 Ethereum’s congestion troubles had been building for years, dragging throughput down to roughly 10–15 TPS while pushing gas fees past 300 Gwei during peak moments. That snowball hit its peak between late 2023 and early 2024, creating a chokepoint for both scaling and mainstream adoption; after all, there’s little sense in a transaction fee that costs twice as much as the transfer itself.

The fix for this problem had actually been sketched out back in early 2022, yet it took two more years to become mainnet-ready, arriving with the Deneb-Cancun (Dencun) fork. That upgrade delivered the much-anticipated proto-danksharding capability via EIP-4844, which slots in off-chain data blobs, cheap, short-lived storage that holds transaction data, and in doing so slashes what L2s have to pay to record their transaction data on-chain.

It worked well beyond expectations: gas prices fell from an average of 98 Gwei to an average below 10 Gwei for most of the time afterward, with the floor routinely touching 1 Gwei.

Source: Everstake’s crypto report 2024

Transaction fees on L2 networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism fell by over 90% almost immediately. Dencun laid the data-availability groundwork that later upgrades built on.

Where Ethereum Stands in 2026

Over 50% of all ETH ever issued has now passed through the PoS deposit contract, a threshold crossed in February 2026. 

As reported on Everstake’s analysis of the Ethereum staking milestone, the contract held approximately 80.95 million ETH, or 50.18% of historical issuance before token burns.

That figure counts cumulative deposits over time, since the deposit contract balance only grows. The ETH actively securing the network stood at around 37.3 million ETH, roughly 30.5% of the circulating supply of about 122 million ETH.

The validator set reached nearly 1 million active validators as of February 2026. Daily transactions rose more than 100% year over year, and daily active addresses doubled.

Pectra activated on May 7, 2025, bundling 11 EIPs that reshaped three areas:

• validator limits,
• blob capacity,
• wallet behavior.

As covered in Everstake’s review of the Pectra anniversary, compounding validators surpassed 26% of the validator stake share by May 2026.

EIP-7251 lifted the maximum effective validator balance from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. EIP-6110 cut validator activation time from roughly 12 hours to about 13 minutes.

Fusaka followed on December 3, 2025, with PeerDAS (EIP-7594) as its headline feature. That upgrade expanded blob throughput for rollups, and L2 transaction fees on major networks now sit consistently below $0.02.

Upgrade Timeline

Upgrade	Date	Headline Change
Frontier (launch)	July 30, 2015	Genesis block, first production release
Homestead	March 2016	First major post-launch upgrade
DAO Fork	July 2016	Reversed 3.6M ETH exploit, split off Ethereum Classic
The Merge (Paris)	September 15, 2022	Proof-of-work to proof-of-stake
Shapella	April 2023	Enabled staking withdrawals
Dencun	March 2024	EIP-4844 blobs, L2 fees down over 90%
Pectra	May 7, 2025	11 EIPs, max validator balance to 2,048 ETH
Fusaka	December 3, 2025	PeerDAS, expanded blob data availability
Glamsterdam	Q3 2026 (target)	ePBS, Block-Level Access Lists

Glamsterdam: The Next Hard Fork

Glamsterdam is Ethereum’s next hard fork after Fusaka, targeting activation in the second half of 2026. As detailed in Everstake’s Glamsterdam upgrade explainer, the name pairs Gloas (the consensus-layer component) with Amsterdam (the execution-layer component).

Two headline proposals anchor the upgrade:

1. EIP-7732 (ePBS) enshrines proposer-builder separation directly in the protocol, replacing the off-chain relays used by systems like MEV-Boost today.
2. EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) maps the state each block touches, enabling parallel transaction execution across CPU cores.

Together these changes support a planned gas limit increase from today’s ~60M toward 200M. Higher block capacity may distribute base-fee pressure across more transactions, though actual fees remain demand-driven.

ETH holders need to take no action for Glamsterdam. Stakers and node operators must update both consensus-layer (CL) and execution-layer (EL) clients before mainnet activation, and prepare for the new Payload Timeliness Committee (PTC) attestation duty.

Where the Roadmap Goes Next

Ethereum’s longer-term direction is mapped in the community roadmap sometimes called the Strawmap, organized around five multi-year priorities. Everstake’s breakdown of the roadmap’s five north stars covers where the protocol aims to go past Glamsterdam.

Near-term, the Hegotá upgrade (targeted for 2026-2027) is headlined by FOCIL (Fork-Choice enforced Inclusion Lists, EIP-7805) for censorship resistance. Candidates under discussion include Verkle Trees, which could reduce node storage requirements by approximately 90%, and stateless clients.

Source: Strawmap.org 

Longer horizons on the updated ‘Lean Ethereum’ roadmap point toward four themes:

• Quantum resistance for signature schemes
• Verification through recursive STARKs
• Opt-in privacy at the protocol level
• Multidimensional gas
• One- or two-round finality
• Autonomous agents transacting onchain
• ZK-EVM verification, letting Ethereum verify its own execution via ZK proofs

These goals reflect active long-term research directions on the roadmap.

Everstake and 11 Years of Ethereum

Ethereum has grown from an idea in a whitepaper into a network securing over 37 million staked ETH across nearly 1 million validators. Eleven years on, roughly 30.5% of the total supply is locked in staking.

Everstake has watched, and helped shape this network’s evolution for years, staking ETH from the very first day of proof-of-stake and running validators way before that in the early phase of Ethereum.

As an early validator, Everstake supports every upgrade across its validator infrastructure, including Ethereum staking, and looks ahead to the changes the roadmap brings through Glamsterdam and beyond.

FAQ

When did Ethereum launch?

Ethereum mainnet went live on July 30, 2015, when the founding team mined the genesis block. That makes July 30, 2026 the 11th anniversary of the network, a milestone Everstake tracks as an active Ethereum validator.

How much did the Ethereum crowdsale raise?

The Ethereum crowdsale ran from July to September 2014 and raised roughly $18 million in BTC. Contributors received over 60 million ETH, a distribution later fundraising models drew on.

What was The DAO fork?

The DAO fork was a July 2016 hard fork that reversed an exploit draining about 3.6 million ETH, worth roughly $50 million at the time. The community vote split the chain into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

When did Ethereum switch to proof-of-stake?

Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake at block 15,537,393 on September 15, 2022, in an upgrade called The Merge or Paris. Over 400,000 validators had staked around 13 million ETH ahead of it.

How much ETH is staked on Ethereum now?

As of February 2026, active staked ETH stood at around 37.3 million ETH, roughly 30.5% of the circulating supply of about 122 million ETH. Over 50% of all ETH ever issued has passed through the PoS deposit contract, per Everstake’s staking-milestone analysis.

What is the Glamsterdam upgrade?

Glamsterdam is Ethereum’s next hard fork, targeting 2026 with EIP-7732 (ePBS) and EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists). It supports a gas limit increase from 60M toward 200M.

Does an ETH holder need to do anything for these upgrades?

No. ETH holders take no action for hard forks like Glamsterdam, and any message urging you to “upgrade your ETH” is a scam. Stakers and node operators must update CL and EL clients, which Everstake handles for users on its infrastructure.