In Honor of Ethereum’s 10-Year Anniversary

BeInCrypto is taking a comprehensive look at the 10 most critical contributions of this revolutionary blockchain to the crypto industry.

These contributions include its smart contracts, ERC-20, EVM, and other important standards, Layer-2 protocols, DAO governance, and their influence on DeFi, ICOs, NFTs, meme coins, ETFs, and more. Ethereum has achieved a lot.

Ten Years of Ethereum

Since Vitalik Buterin first launched Ethereum a decade ago, smart contracts have been a key feature of its blockchain. While Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, allowed for smart contracts, Satoshi Nakamoto mostly focused on its trustless and decentralized structure.

Conversely, Ethereum introduced Solidity, a programming language specifically designed for smart contracts.

Ten years later, quantifying the influence of Ethereum’s smart contracts is challenging, yet they remain one of the blockchain’s strongest features, inspiring significant diversification across protocols.

According to Etherscan, the explosive growth in unique Ethereum addresses illustrates this impact.

The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) Standard has further empowered smart contracts, governing their operations, processing transactions, and monitoring the global ETH ecosystem. This standard enhances Ethereum’s capabilities for users worldwide, facilitating new opportunities in decentralized finance.

Ethereum Revolutionizes Token Minting and Blockchain Use

The ERC-20 Standard represents another essential contribution from Ethereum over the past decade. Prior to ERC-20, creating tokens on a blockchain was inconsistent and fragmented.

By standardizing the rules for new tokens, Ethereum created a path for over a million assets to be uniform, fungible, and interoperable.

Due to ERC-20, Ethereum became Tether’s preferred blockchain for minting USDT tokens, the world’s most popular stablecoin. Academic papers have attempted to quantify the positive impact of this standard on the crypto industry.

Moreover, Ethereum’s capability to host Layer-2 protocols has transformed the sector over the decade, providing solutions to crucial issues like scalability within classical blockchain frameworks. Notably, Bitcoin now also utilizes L2 protocols, but Ethereum was the pioneer.

ICO Boom and the Birthplace of DeFi

One significant benefit of ERC-20 was the ICO Boom of the late 2010s. Protocols such as ChainLink and Basic Attention Token leveraged it to launch their LINK and BAT tokens respectively.

Some of these protocols have since surpassed Ethereum in developer activity, underlining their relevance.

With advancements in technology, an active community, and capabilities for hosting decentralized exchanges, Ethereum is arguably viewed as the birthplace of DeFi.

Its infrastructure has allowed for the development of a trustless economic ecosystem. Additionally, its DAO governance model has propelled financial democracy on an unprecedented scale.

Hart Lambur, Co-founder of Risk Labs, commented on Ethereum’s DeFi influence:
> “The real endgame is straightforward: A giant payments and exchange network that connects every blockchain. If most assets become tokenized – money, equities, bonds, real-world assets – Ethereum becomes the settlement and payment layer for all things of value on the internet.”

The total value locked on Ethereum’s blockchain has seen remarkable growth over the last ten years:

NFTs, Memes, ETFs, and More

These elements combined have made Ethereum the clear home of NFTs, which were previously unprecedented a decade ago.

By integrating self-executing smart contracts with a DeFi-focused community and new token standards, ETH became the central figure in the 2021 NFT boom, which remains influential today.

While Dogecoin launched over a decade ago as the first meme coin, Ethereum’s Shiba Inu revived the sector. Although superficially similar, the nuances of Ethereum’s DeFi infrastructure spurred a wave of meme coins.

Although developers on Ethereum didn’t directly create these meme coins, their efforts laid the groundwork for the vibrant sector we see today.

Finally, Ethereum played a significant role in another important area. After Bitcoin secured the first US-approved spot ETF, ETH followed suit just months later. This approval indicated that the SEC would allow more altcoin products, leading to a recent surge in applications. Furthermore, ETH ETFs are currently overshadowing BTC ETFs.

In conclusion, Ethereum has made numerous contributions to crypto over the last decade, marking a significant departure from Bitcoin and introducing a plethora of features that have created a new paradigm.

Ethereum’s impact on every aspect of the crypto community is undeniable, and its ongoing adoption suggests that its contributions will remain crucial for years to come.