Last month marked the 2 year anniversary of Ethereum's public announcement at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Florida, USA. Amid much rumour and excitement, a sizeable crowd mobbed the young Vitalik Buterin after his on-stage announcement, questioning the merit and his desire to build such a system.

It can be hard to truly appreciate how far we've come in the last couple years. Sometimes it feels as though the cryptoeconomic sphere moves at such a blistering speed that weekly news announcements have become the norm rather than the exception. Interest in the field has exploded for lots of great reasons, but none of that particularly matters unless the underlying technology exists.

A look back

To frame things appropriately, consider that Ethereum was formally announced on January 25, 2014. Back then, the price of Bitcoin had recently peaked and was hovering around $800. Alternative uses of "blockchain technology" included Namecoin as decentralized name system atop a global key/value store. Only a month prior, researchers demonstrated in a paper that block times under 1 second were possible. In short, it seemed there was nothing blockchains couldn't do.

With all these possibilities, how could a single protocol be made to accommodate all the varying needs? As a first experiment, Bitcoin was already gaining quickly in value. What began as a cypherpunk dream had blossomed into an industry. Changes to the core protocol risked billions in value and there was no clear governance in place for proposing and including changes.

Bootstrap

By April of 2014, Dr. Gavin Wood published the Ethereum Yellow Paper that would serve as the technical bible and de-facto specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). From this vantage point, Ethereum pursued a course of producing implementations that matched a specification, as opposed to being a specification defined by an implementation.

Contrast this to the Ethereum ecosystem which today has no less than 6 implementations of consensus: C++, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, and Haskell. When a discrepancy occurs, a roundtable of client developers can compare results and discuss the ramifications.

Concurrent to this initial development, several legal entities were formed to provide a framework for coordinating the organised effort. The result was Stiftung Ethereum being established in June 2014 in Zug, Switzerland. With all the paperwork and agreements in place, a crowdsale of Ether tokens was held in Summer 2014.

Kickstart

As the Ethereum proof-of-concept (PoC) series marched forward and the Ether Sale finishing towards the end of summer, the stage was set to execute on the vision. In less than a year, the legal and financial framework was in place to begin full-scale development of a next-generation blockchain platform.

In November 2014, the majority of the Ethereum project team descended upon Berlin to participate in the first Ethereum conference: DEVCON0. Although many had spoke via Skype, this was a time when most of the project members met for the first time. At this proto-conference, developers took turns explaining their vision for any given segment of the many protocols that would be necessary.

Heroic efforts

It would go for several months through the holidays with increased development occurring early in 2015. Around this time, Jeff Wilcke called the Go development team together in Amsterdam to evaluate the state of the software. This dogfooding was the nexus point from which many of the working groups were established to build towards the Mist vision.

As the software audits progressed, the bug bounty program was in full swing and the DevGrants program began to more publicly emerge. Eventually, the teams focused on ensuring a stable feature-rich command line interface was available for developers to begin working with.

Wild West

Eventually, the most severe problems would be fixed and Ethereum mainnet would launch the beta-esque Frontier mere months after many Ethereum developers met for the first time, ever. It was July 2015, a mere year since the crowdsale and Ethereum had a working network.

Following a short delay, DEVCON1 was announced to take place in London, England for a week in November 2015. Almost 400 people joined together at this location for an entire week, totaling 80 talks and topics about the Ethereum ecosystem.

Homesteading

Fast-forwarding to present day, there is a healthy network with increasing transaction volume along with dozens of DApps starting to appear. A large amount of effort has gone into mobile builds for both the C++ and Go clients that will become even more important as low-power devices replace traditional desktops.

We are now on the precipice of the Homestead hard fork, tweaking minor issues before releasing what will be considered the "stable" version of the network.

Dreaming forward

The fundamental insight Vitalik described in his paper was how to abstract decentralised transfer of value to a generalised state transition function, supporting any application. Combined with a peer-to-peer network, Ethereum strives to do everything Bitcoin does and more. But our effort isn't complete and there still remains much innovation to uncover.

"Isn't it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them." –Orville Wright