The answer is complicated but the simple answer is a bunch of folks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cidea\u201d of Ethereum originated from then 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin<\/strong>, computer programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine who REALLLY wanted more use cases for blockchain technology than supporting cryptocurrencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, in November 2013 Buterin leveled up his \u201cUltimate Scripting\u201d project and introduced \u201cEthereum\u201d via a whitepaper<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What this project intends to do is take cryptocurrency 2.0, and generalize it \u2013 create a fully-fledged, Turing-complete (but heavily fee-regulated) cryptographic ledger that allows participants to encode arbitrarily complex contracts, autonomous agents and relationships that will be mediated entirely by the blockchain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On-chain currencies, futures contracts, prediction markets, Namecoin-style domain name systems and even provably fair gambling sites will become trivial to implement, existing as simple, hundred-line-of-code contracts on the chain.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n But Buterin didn\u2019t have a solid computer language yet, let alone a Turing-complete one. He also hadn\u2019t formed a team to build the project with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In true geek fashion, our boy got the first supporters and used the \u201cgreedy algorithm\u201d to recruit the rest of the \u201cfirst five\u201d co-founders:<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then the founding team quickly expanded to eight to include a few key players:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The gang lucked out with Dr. Gavin Wood, who not only helped Buterin with his C++ but was also responsible for shifting the project\u2019s vision from \u201cprogrammable money that\u2019s moved around by contracts\u201d to a more general-purpose computing platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also conceptualized Solidity<\/strong>, the actual programming language that runs Ethereum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s thanks to Solidity that developers can create dApps, design smart contracts, and launch Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) on Ethereum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I guess you could say that Gavin Wood did the team\u2026 a solid. ity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No wonder Wood left out everyone else\u2019s names when he wrote Ethereum\u2019s \u201cYellow Paper<\/a>\u201d in April 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His groupmates be slackin\u2019!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kidding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other members were busy doing other things including establishing the Swiss-based nonprofit Ethereum Foundation in June 2014 so that it could oversee the first-ever Ether sale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The 42-day \u201cpresale\u201d that ended in September 2014 netted a cool 31,591 BTC, which translated to $18,439,08<\/strong>6 at the time in exchange for about 60,102,216 ETH<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Funding secured!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The presale gains went into development and in July 2015, the team launched the Frontier network where miners were able to load and generate the Ethereum Genesis block.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few months later, prediction markets protocol Augur<\/strong> ran the first-ever initial coin offering (ICO)<\/strong> on the Ethereum blockchain and raised over $5 million in 45 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All was going well in Ethereum-ville until 2016 when an attacker exploited a vulnerability in a popular (but unrefined) smart contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was German startup Slock.it that developed a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) creatively called \u201cThe DAO.\u201d The project promised to use the ETH it would raise in its sale to fund Uber and Airbnb-like projects with ETH. In return, token holders get to vote on which proposals to fund and possibly receive dividends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The DAO became wildly popular and raised over 11.5 million ETH within a 27-day crowd sale. That was more than $150 million and 16% of all Ether supply!<\/p>\n\n\n\n But The DAO\u2019s smart contract \u2013 not the Ethereum network \u2013 had loopholes and with a lot of moolah on the line, a \u201chacker\u201d was able to siphon $50 million worth of ETH from the project\u2019s Ethereum address and into a \u201cchild DAO.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The amount of ETH tied to the project and the hits that Ethereum\u2019s rep took led to the Ethereum Foundation stepping in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Will it stick to the \u201ccode is law\u201d principle and let the attacker get away with its gains? Or will it make an exception to the \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d project and \u201cundo\u201d the attacker\u2019s hack?<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a civil war among Ethereum community k\u0336e\u0336y\u0336b\u0336o\u0336a\u0336r\u0336d\u0336 \u0336w\u0336a\u0336r\u0336r\u0336i\u0336o\u0336r\u0336s members, a hard fork was eventually implemented. Ethereum\u2019s blockchain splintered into one with the DAO hack and one without.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The blockchain with the OG code that allowed the DAO hack to remain a part of its history became known as Ethereum Classic (ETC)<\/strong>, while the blockchain that reversed the hack and returned the \u201cstolen\u201d ETH is what many now call the Ethereum (ETH)<\/strong> blockchain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The DAO hack wasn\u2019t the first drama in the Ethereum project, and it won\u2019t be the last. These days, the project is focused on \u201d The Merge\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Merge<\/a> involves the \u201cmerging\u201d of the Ethereum main chain with the \u201cBeacon Chain\u201d, a brand-new, proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain. When this occurs, Ethereum will be one step closer to achieving the full scale, security, and sustainability outlined in its Ethereum vision<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s the Ethereum Foundation funding multiple research and development teams that will facilitate the transition to The Merge. Among the OG founders, only Buterin remains active in Ethereum\u2019s development<\/strong>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The answer is complicated but the simple answer is a bunch of folks. The \u201cidea\u201d of Ethereum originated from then 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin, computer programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine who REALLLY wanted more use cases for blockchain technology than supporting cryptocurrencies. So, in November 2013 Buterin leveled up his \u201cUltimate Scripting\u201d project and introduced \u201cEthereum\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beginners-guide-to-ethereum","category-learn-crypto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3033,"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions\/3033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apex-aiexperts.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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The DAO Hack and Ethereum Fork<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Merge<\/h2>\n\n\n\n