Evolution of Ethereum
ethreum.org
Last updated
ethreum.org
Last updated
A timeline of all the major milestones, forks, and updates to the Ethereum blockchain.
Forks are changes to the rules of the Ethereum protocol which often include planned technical upgrades.
Looking for future protocol upgrades? .
Jun-30-2022 10:54:04 AM +UTC
🧱Block number:
ETH price: $1,069 USD
Summary
The Gray Glacier network upgrade pushed back the by three months. This is the only change introduced in this upgrade, and is similar in nature to the and upgrades. Similar changes have been performed on the , and network upgrades.
Dec-09-2021 07:55:23 PM +UTC
🧱Block number:
ETH price: $4,111 USD
Summary
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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!
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The Berlin upgrade optimized gas cost for certain EVM actions and increases support for multiple transaction types.
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The Istanbul fork:
Improved denial-of-service attack resilience.
Enabled Ethereum and Zcash to interoperate.
Allowed contracts to introduce more creative functions.
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The Constantinople fork:
Added the ability to interact with addresses that haven't been created yet.
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The Byzantium fork:
Added ability to make non-state-changing calls to other contracts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ether officially went on sale for 42 days. You could buy it with BTC.
The Yellow Paper, authored by Dr. Gavin Wood, is a technical definition of the Ethereum protocol.
The introductory paper was published in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, before the project's launch in 2015.
The Arrow Glacier network upgrade pushed back the by several months. This is the only change introduced in this upgrade, and is similar in nature to the upgrade. Similar changes have been performed on the , and network upgrades.
Oct-27-2021 10:56:23 AM +UTC
🧱Epoch number: 74,240
ETH price: $4,024 USD
The Altair upgrade was the first scheduled upgrade for the . It added support for 'sync committees' — enabling light clients as well as bringing validator inactivity and slashing penalties up to their full values.
Fun fact!
Aug-05-2021 12:33:42 PM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $2,621 USD
The London upgrade introduced , which reformed the transaction fee market, along with changes to how gas refunds are handled and the schedule.
Apr-15-2021 10:07:03 AM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $2,454 USD
Dec-01-2020 12:00:35 PM +UTC
🧱 Beacon Chain block number:
ETH price: $586.23 USD
The 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 .
Oct-14-2020 09:22:52 AM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $379.04 USD
The staking deposit contract introduced to the Ethereum ecosystem. Although a contract, it had a direct impact on the timeline for launching the , an important .
Jan-02-2020 08:30:49 AM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $127.18 USD
The Muir Glacier fork introduced a delay to the . Increases in block difficulty of the consensus mechanism threatened to degrade the usability of Ethereum by increasing wait times for sending transactions and using dapps.
Dec-08-2019 12:25:09 AM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $151.06 USD
Optimized the cost of certain actions in the .
Made solutions based on SNARKs and STARKs more performant.
Feb-28-2019 07:52:04 PM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $136.29 USD
Ensured the blockchain didn't freeze before .
Optimized the cost of certain actions in the .
Oct-16-2017 05:22:11 AM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $334.23 USD
Reduced block rewards from 5 to 3 ETH.
Delayed the by a year.
Added certain cryptography methods to allow for .
Nov-22-2016 04:15:44 PM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $9.84 USD
Oct-18-2016 01:19:31 PM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $12.50 USD
Jul-20-2016 01:20:40 PM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $12.54 USD
The DAO fork was in response to the where an insecure contract was drained of over 3.6 million ETH in a hack. The fork moved the funds from the faulty contract to a 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 . 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 .
Mar-14-2016 06:49:53 PM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $12.50 USD
Sep-07-2015 09:33:09 PM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: $1.24 USD
The frontier thawing fork lifted the 5,000 limit per and set the default gas price to 51 . This allowed for transactions –– transactions require 21,000 gas. The was introduced to ensure a future hard fork to .
Jul-30-2015 03:26:13 PM +UTC
🧱 Block number:
ETH price: N/A
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. had a 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’.
July 22 - September 02, 2014
April 01, 2014
November 27, 2013
