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Ethereum — A Blockchain That Runs Programs, The DAO and The Merge
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Ethereum is a system that lets programs, not just records of payments, run on a blockchain. Its first live release, Frontier, went online on 30 July 2015. The idea came from the programmer Vitalik Buterin, and ethereum.org's history dates the release of his white paper to 27 November 2013.
Bitcoin had shown how to run electronic cash on a public record protected by computation. Ethereum put a programming language that could express any computation on top of such a record. This article offers no investment guidance and makes no price predictions.
The white paper: building in a Turing-complete language
The white paper argues that the more important part of the Bitcoin experiment is not the currency but the blockchain as a tool of distributed consensus. People were already talking about custom currencies, records of ownership and "smart contracts" — programs that move assets directly according to rules written in code — but Bitcoin's scripting language was limited; among other things, it could not express loops.
What the white paper proposed was "a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language". Turing-complete means able, in principle, to express any computation. With it, the paper said, anyone could write smart contracts and decentralised applications and set their own rules for ownership and transaction formats. To guard against accidental or hostile infinite loops, every transaction sets a limit on how many computational steps it may use, and pays a fee per unit of computation, called gas.
According to Wikipedia, Buterin was a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. The original PDF of the white paper is published as the 2014 version.
2014 to 2015: the sale and Frontier
| Date | Event (from ethereum.org's history) |
|---|---|
| 27 November 2013 | White paper released |
| 1 April 2014 | Yellow Paper, Gavin Wood's technical definition of the protocol |
| 22 July 2014 | Sale of the currency, ether, begins; for 42 days it could be bought with bitcoin |
| 30 July 2015 | First live release, Frontier |
| 7 September 2015 | Frontier thawing lifts the gas limit of 5,000, allowing ordinary transactions, which need 21,000 gas |
ethereum.org describes Frontier as a live but bare-bones implementation intended for technical users, specifically developers. On launch day, writing on the Ethereum Foundation's blog, Stephan Tual said users had generated and loaded the Genesis block, marking the start of Frontier, and that the vision of a censorship-proof "world computer" that anyone could program, paying only for what they used, was now a reality.
2016: The DAO and the hard fork
One of the first large ventures built from smart contracts was The DAO. According to the investigative report the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published on 25 July 2017, events ran as follows.
| Date | Event (from the SEC report) |
|---|---|
| 30 April – 28 May 2016 | The DAO sells about 1.15 billion DAO Tokens for about 12 million ETH, worth about $150 million at the time |
| 17 June 2016 | An unknown attacker exploits a flaw in the code and begins moving about 3.6 million ETH — about a third of the total raised — to an address under their control |
| 20 July 2016 | After a majority of the Ethereum network adopts the necessary software update, the new, forked blockchain becomes active |
The hard fork moved all of The DAO's funds, including those held by the attacker, to a recovery address where DAO Token holders could exchange their tokens for ETH. According to ethereum.org, the decision was put to a vote of ETH holders and won more than 85% of the votes.
A minority did not follow. The SEC report says they kept using the former version of the chain, because changing it would run counter to the idea that a blockchain is immutable, and that this became Ethereum Classic. ethereum.org likewise says some miners refused to fork because the incident was not a defect in the protocol.
The SEC report also concluded that DAO Tokens were securities under US law, so their offer and sale had to be registered unless a valid exemption applied.
15 September 2022: The Merge
Like Bitcoin, Ethereum originally ran on proof-of-work, competing on computation. ethereum.org says a move to proof-of-stake was planned from the very beginning, but doing it without sacrificing security and decentralisation took years of research and development.
The switch came in two steps. According to the Ethereum Foundation's announcement of 24 August 2022, the Bellatrix upgrade first activated on the consensus layer (the Beacon Chain) on 6 September 2022; Paris, on the execution layer, would follow once proof-of-work reached a set Total Difficulty value. ethereum.org's history records that the value was reached on 15 September 2022 and that Paris activated at block 15,537,394, switching off proof-of-work mining and switching on proof-of-stake. This was The Merge.
Under proof-of-stake, staked ETH rather than spent electricity secures the network. The Ethereum Foundation had published figures on the expected energy savings before the switch.
| When | Claim or estimate |
|---|---|
| 18 May 2021 | Ethereum Foundation blog (Carl Beekhuizen): at least ~99.95% less energy after the merge; Digiconomist put proof-of-work mining at 44.49 TWh a year |
| After the switch | ethereum.org: CCRI estimates annual electricity use fell by more than 99.988%, and the carbon footprint by about 99.992%, from 11,016,000 to 870 tonnes CO2e |
| Current estimate | ethereum.org: a CCRI study puts the whole network's annual electricity use at about 0.0026 TWh |
These are figures published by Ethereum's own side, or estimates it cites. ethereum.org itself notes that estimates vary widely between sources and that environmental impact depends on the mix of energy sources.
Afterwards
Upgrades continued after The Merge, now deployed to the execution and consensus layers together; the latest in ethereum.org's history is Fusaka, on 3 December 2025.
Token standards also grew up on Ethereum's smart contracts. ERC-721, a standard for tokens that can each be told apart, became the foundation of the NFT boom of 2021. The wider story of moving value over the network is on the internet and web timeline.
Questions this page answers
- When did Ethereum start?
- According to ethereum.org's history, Vitalik Buterin's white paper was released on 27 November 2013 and the first live release, Frontier, went online on 30 July 2015. Frontier was a bare-bones first version aimed at developers and other technical users.
- What was The DAO hack?
- The DAO, an investment vehicle that raised about 12 million ETH between 30 April and 28 May 2016, had about 3.6 million ETH — roughly a third — diverted on 17 June by an attacker exploiting a flaw in its code. A hard fork on 20 July 2016 moved the funds to a recovery address.
- What is Ethereum Classic?
- The chain kept by those who refused the 2016 hard fork that rescued The DAO's funds and went on using the original record. The minority objected that changing it ran against the idea that a blockchain is immutable.
- What did The Merge change?
- On 15 September 2022 the network switched from proof-of-work, which competes on computation, to proof-of-stake, which is secured by staked ETH. Citing CCRI, ethereum.org says annual electricity use fell by more than 99.988% and the carbon footprint by about 99.992%.
Sources
PrimaryTimeline of all Ethereum forks (2014 to present) — ethereum.org
White paper (27 November 2013), Yellow Paper (1 April 2014), the ether sale (from 22 July 2014 for 42 days), Frontier (30 July 2015), the DAO fork (20 July 2016, block 1,920,000) and Paris (15 September 2022, block 15,537,394)
TertiaryEthereum — Wikipedia
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