The Birth of Ethereum: A Journey from Concept to Reality

 History

Founding (2013–2014)

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 2015

Ethereum was initially described in late 2013 in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin, a programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. The paper outlined a way to build decentralized applications using blockchain technology. Buterin argued to Bitcoin Core developers that blockchain could have applications beyond money, and that it needed a more robust language for developing such applications. He envisioned attaching real-world assets, like stocks and property, to the blockchain.

In 2013, Buterin briefly collaborated with eToro CEO Yoni Assia on the Colored Coins project and drafted its white paper, which detailed additional blockchain use cases. After failing to reach an agreement on how to proceed with the project, Buterin proposed creating a new platform with a more advanced scripting language—a Turing-complete programming language—that would eventually become Ethereum.

Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami in January 2014. During the conference, Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, and Anthony Di Iorio (who financed the project) rented a house in Miami with Buterin to develop a clearer vision for Ethereum. Di Iorio invited his friend Joseph Lubin, who brought along reporter Morgen Peck to document the experience. Peck later wrote about it in Wired.

Six months later, the founders reconvened in Zug, Switzerland, where Buterin announced that the project would proceed as a non-profit. Hoskinson left the project at that point and went on to found IOHK, a blockchain company responsible for Cardano.

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Ethereum has an unusually long list of founders. Anthony Di Iorio wrote: "Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, myself, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit (the initial five) in December 2013. Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke were added as founders in early 2014." Buterin chose the name Ethereum after browsing a list of elements from science fiction on Wikipedia. He explained, "I immediately realized that I liked it better than all of the other alternatives that I had seen; I suppose it was that it sounded nice and it had the word 'ether', referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel." Buterin wanted his platform to be the underlying and imperceptible medium for the applications running on top of it.