Evolution of Ethereum

ethreum.org

The history of Ethereum

A timeline of all the major milestones, forks, and updates to the Ethereum blockchain.

What are forks?

Forks are changes to the rules of the Ethereum protocol which often include planned technical upgrades.

Looking for future protocol upgrades? Learn about upcoming upgrades to Ethereum.

2022

Gray Glacier

Jun-30-2022 10:54:04 AM +UTC 🧱Block number: 15,050,000 ETH price: $1,069 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Gray Glacier network upgrade pushed back the difficulty bomb by three months. This is the only change introduced in this upgrade, and is similar in nature to the Arrow Glacier and Muir Glacier upgrades. Similar changes have been performed on the Byzantium, Constantinople and London network upgrades.

EF Blog - Gray Glacier Upgrade Announcement

2021

Arrow Glacier

Dec-09-2021 07:55:23 PM +UTC 🧱Block number: 13,773,000 ETH price: $4,111 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Arrow Glacier network upgrade pushed back the difficulty bomb by several months. This is the only change introduced in this upgrade, and is similar in nature to the Muir Glacier upgrade. Similar changes have been performed on the Byzantium, Constantinople and London network upgrades.

Altair

Oct-27-2021 10:56:23 AM +UTC 🧱Epoch number: 74,240 ETH price: $4,024 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Altair upgrade was the first scheduled upgrade for the Beacon Chain. It added support for 'sync committees' — enabling light clients as well as bringing validator inactivity and slashing penalties up to their full values.

Read the Altair upgrade specification

Fun fact!

Altair was the first major network upgrade that had an exact rollout time. Every upgrade prior had been based on a declared block number on the proof-of-work chain, where block times vary. The Beacon Chain does not require solving for Proof of Work, and instead works on a time-based epoch system consisting of 32 twelve-second "slots" of time where validators can propose blocks. This is why we knew exactly when we would hit epoch 74,240 and Altair went live!

Beaconcha.in Glossary - Slots

London

Aug-05-2021 12:33:42 PM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 12,965,000 ETH price: $2,621 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The London upgrade introduced EIP-1559, which reformed the transaction fee market, along with changes to how gas refunds are handled and the Ice Age schedule.

Berlin

Apr-15-2021 10:07:03 AM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 12,244,000 ETH price: $2,454 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Berlin upgrade optimized gas cost for certain EVM actions and increases support for multiple transaction types.

2020

Beacon Chain genesis

Dec-01-2020 12:00:35 PM +UTC 🧱 Beacon Chain block number: 1 ETH price: $586.23 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Beacon Chain needed 16384 deposits of 32 staked ETH to ship securely. This happened on November 27, meaning the Beacon Chain started producing blocks on December 1, 2020. This is an important first step in achieving the Ethereum vision.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

Staking deposit contract deployed

Oct-14-2020 09:22:52 AM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 11,052,984 ETH price: $379.04 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The staking deposit contract introduced staking to the Ethereum ecosystem. Although a Mainnet contract, it had a direct impact on the timeline for launching the Beacon Chain, an important Ethereum upgrade.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

Muir Glacier

Jan-02-2020 08:30:49 AM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 9,200,000 ETH price: $127.18 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Muir Glacier fork introduced a delay to the difficulty bomb. Increases in block difficulty of the proof-of-work consensus mechanism threatened to degrade the usability of Ethereum by increasing wait times for sending transactions and using dapps.

2019

Istanbul

Dec-08-2019 12:25:09 AM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 9,069,000 ETH price: $151.06 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Istanbul fork:

Optimized the gas cost of certain actions in the EVM.
Improved denial-of-service attack resilience.
Made layer-2 scaling solutions based on SNARKs and STARKs more performant.
Enabled Ethereum and Zcash to interoperate.
Allowed contracts to introduce more creative functions.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

Constantinople

Feb-28-2019 07:52:04 PM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 7,280,000 ETH price: $136.29 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Constantinople fork:

Ensured the blockchain didn't freeze before proof-of-stake was implemented.
Optimized the gas cost of certain actions in the EVM.
Added the ability to interact with addresses that haven't been created yet.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

2017

Byzantium

Oct-16-2017 05:22:11 AM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 4,370,000 ETH price: $334.23 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Byzantium fork:

Reduced block mining rewards from 5 to 3 ETH.
Delayed the difficulty bomb by a year.
Added ability to make non-state-changing calls to other contracts.
Added certain cryptography methods to allow for layer-2 scaling.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

2016

Spurious Dragon

Nov-22-2016 04:15:44 PM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 2,675,000 ETH price: $9.84 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Spurious Dragon fork was the second response to the denial of service (DoS) attacks on the network (September/October 2016) including:

tuning opcode pricing to prevent future attacks on the network.
enabling 'debloat' of the blockchain state.
adding replay attack protection.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

Tangerine whistle

Oct-18-2016 01:19:31 PM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 2,463,000 ETH price: $12.50 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Tangerine Whistle fork was the first response to the denial of service (DoS) attacks on the network (September/October 2016) including:

addressing urgent network health issues concerning underpriced operation codes.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

DAO fork

Jul-20-2016 01:20:40 PM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 1,920,000 ETH price: $12.54 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The DAO fork was in response to the 2016 DAO attack where an insecure DAO contract was drained of over 3.6 million ETH in a hack. The fork moved the funds from the faulty contract to a new contract with a single function: withdraw. Anyone who lost funds could withdraw 1 ETH for every 100 DAO tokens in their wallets.

This course of action was voted on by the Ethereum community. Any ETH holder was able to vote via a transaction on a voting platform. The decision to fork reached over 85% of the votes.

Some miners refused to fork because the DAO incident wasn't a defect in the protocol. They went on to form Ethereum Classic.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

Homestead

Mar-14-2016 06:49:53 PM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 1,150,000 ETH price: $12.50 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The Homestead fork that looked to the future. It included several protocol changes and a networking change that gave Ethereum the ability to do further network upgrades.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

2015

Frontier thawing

Sep-07-2015 09:33:09 PM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 200,000 ETH price: $1.24 USD ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

The frontier thawing fork lifted the 5,000 gas limit per block and set the default gas price to 51 gwei. This allowed for transactions –– transactions require 21,000 gas. The difficulty bomb was introduced to ensure a future hard fork to Proof of Stake.

Frontier

Jul-30-2015 03:26:13 PM +UTC 🧱 Block number: 0 ETH price: N/A ethereum.org on waybackmachine

Summary

Frontier was live, but barebone implementation of the Ethereum project. It followed the successful Olympic testing phase. It was intended for technical users, specifically developers. Blocks had a gas limit of 5,000. This "thawing" period enabled miners to start their operations and for early adopters to install their clients without having to ‘rush’.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement