Eight Years with Ethereum

First off, happy 10th birthday to Ethereum!

It’s now been exactly eight years since I registered my first Ethereum wallet.

There’s an old saying that, on average, every seven years our bodies undergo a massive cellular renewal.

So, from a biological standpoint, I’m no longer the person I was.

But Ethereum is still Ethereum.

My original Ethereum wallet is still alive and well—even the small amount of leftover ETH I kept there has somehow grown tenfold over time.

Back then, I was at home, typing away and discussing Ethereum.

And here I am, all these years later, still in the same place, still talking about Ethereum. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?

Let me start by talking about myself.

As most people know, I’m a devoted supporter of Bitcoin. But I wouldn’t call myself a BTC maxi (which is basically like being a die-hard, single-minded fan—I’m not like that). I also enjoy Ethereum, BNB, and Solana, and I’m always eager to study and learn about them.

My first Ethereum wallet wasn’t MetaMask—instead, it was that ancient tool, MyEtherWallet. It was so basic that every login required uploading a keystore file and entering your password to unlock it before you could access your wallet.

The reason I wanted an Ethereum wallet in the first place? I wanted to buy a CryptoKitty.

At the time, two kitties could breed, some had rare traits, and each cat had its own unique production rate, leading to infinite generations and endless speculation.

My first time using MetaMask wasn’t until 2020—back then, I was trading the original algorithmic stablecoin, AMPL. Its standout feature was that if the price went above $1, everyone got more tokens, and if it dropped below $1, tokens were deducted, all to maintain stability through supply and demand adjustments.

These two wallets really capture two different eras. Broadly speaking, I break down Ethereum’s evolution into four phases:

Era 0 (2015-2016): Ethereum is born

Era 1 (2017-2019): The ICO Era

Era 2 (2020-2022): The DeFi Era

Era 3 (2023-2025): The LST Era

Era 4 (2025–present): The Asset Era

[Era 1: The ICO Era]

Back in 2015-2016, Ethereum really only had one killer feature—smart contracts. That was a game changer, since other altcoins like Ripple and Litecoin didn’t have anything like it.

But in those days, most people didn’t know how to truly develop smart contracts—up until 2017, the main use was just launching new tokens.

I mean, I was still using a bare-bones wallet like MyEtherWallet—there was no way the Dapp ecosystem could take off under those circumstances.

Still, just being able to issue tokens was a huge deal. Before Ethereum, creating a new coin meant tweaking code (for example, swapping “Bitcoin” for “Litecoin”), recruiting miners, and constantly monitoring the network’s stability. It was incredibly complicated.

At least 80% of people just wanted a coin to speculate on and didn’t care about the underlying technology (in fact, even today the “narrative” barely matters. I wish I’d understood that sooner).

Ethereum perfectly hit this need, becoming the undisputed superstar of its time.

I remember vividly: when China announced the September 4 crypto ban, ETH was 1,400 RMB (Chinese yuan). Six months later, it was 1,400 USD!

That price run-up was classic FOMO driven by supply and demand dynamics.

Think about it—if you were in a group chat, you might join one to three public ICOs every day, and each one required ETH. You’d send ETH to a smart contract with the chance to earn 3x to 100x returns. Of course you’d want to stock up on Ethereum.

But the crash came just as suddenly.

I still tell friends the stories of SpaceChain and HeroChain falling below their offering price. SpaceChain aimed to launch blockchain nodes into space; HeroChain was a “gambling chain” supposedly backed by Southeast Asian casino operators.

At the time, these were two of the hottest ICO projects. But both crashed in early 2018, marking the start of a broader collapse.

As teams began cashing out the ETH they’d raised, and participating in ICOs turned into a sure way to lose money, people naturally started selling off their ETH.

By 2019, ETH had dropped as low as $80—the real depths of despair.

I’m hardly immune—I wasn’t an unwavering ETH soldier who kept the faith through a prolonged downtrend.

Keeping up a regular writing habit is a good form of self-examination. Looking back at my March 2018 posts, when ETH was around $400, I was publishing articles questioning Ethereum’s value—if its only use was ICOs, what could it offer after the ICO boom ended?

But there was real insight in the comments. One user, LionStar, nailed it:

“2018 is just the beginning for Ethereum. Everyone in the community knows it lacks scalability and performance—it’s early days. The big vision starts in 2018: PoS, sharding, plasma, truebit, state channels, swarm, ZK proofs, and so on. None of that is live yet—wait five years and see how far Ethereum comes. Most people only care about price—if it goes up, they’re excited; if it drops, they’re pessimistic. That mindset is meaningless. Technology and future potential determine real value; price just catches up eventually.”

Ironic twist: apart from PoS and zero-knowledge proofs, everything else on that list failed to materialize.

But that openness—that’s what makes Ethereum so remarkable. It’s an open framework where all kinds of teams can experiment, as with sharding, plasma, truebit, state channels, and swarm. Most of these are grassroots projects from the community—each team bringing its own vision and drive. That’s the true spirit of the internet and open source.

Continuous, unfettered experimentation is why Ethereum is where it is today.

The Ethereum community moves on two tracks.

One is technology—upgrading Ethereum’s core performance;

The other is applications—building use cases on Ethereum.

Both fronts flourished. Even as Ethereum hit a rough patch, DeFi was quietly gathering momentum.

[Era 2: The DeFi Era]

Everything kicked off in 2020, when Compound started rewarding both depositors and borrowers. Suddenly, people realized Ethereum could host applications with real utility—not just gimmicky games like CryptoKitties.

And these new applications were actually better than traditional ones: lower borrowing costs, higher deposit yields. For a while, “subsidies > borrowing interest” even reversed the normal lending dynamic.

It’s taken for granted now, but at the time it was mind-blowing.

Back then, the only other popular projects were things like distributed storage, solar power, weed coins, or game chains—stuff created just for the sake of it. Ethereum, by contrast, had something with the power to disrupt traditional finance—the equivalent of the first kid in the village to go to college.

ICOs weren’t all hype; some introduced real innovation. For example, AAVE’s predecessor, EthLend, came out of those early ICO days.

So, after bottoming out, Ethereum staged a comeback, and the DeFi era officially began.

DeFi changed the supply-demand picture just like ICOs once had. Protocols like Uniswap and Sushiswap needed tons of ETH as liquidity, causing demand to skyrocket.

With ETH, you could mine, earn high yields, and put up with just a bit of impermanent loss—annual returns over 100% weren’t unusual. This level of yield was highly attractive.

With DeFi shoring up demand, ETH ran up to $4,100 and then hit an all-time high of $4,800 in 2021. That surge reflected widespread optimism (mine included) that Ethereum might eventually overtake traditional finance.

But unlike the ICO craze, by 2021 Ethereum faced fierce competition. DeFi may have started on Ethereum, but the word quickly spread to rival chains—networks offering faster transactions and lower fees. During the ICO era, gas fee differences weren’t a big deal. In the DeFi era, being known as the “chain for the rich” was a marketing disaster for Ethereum, not a compliment.

Soon enough, in 2022, Luna (which can hardly even be called DeFi—it was always a Ponzi) collapsed spectacularly, tanking the market, FTX, and 3AC, and taking down the whole DeFi summer with it.

Just like with ICOs, as the supply-demand balance reversed, participation in yield farming plummeted and Ethereum entered a major downtrend. The ETH/BTC ratio dropped, crushing dreams everywhere.

When DeFi thrives, ETH thrives; when DeFi falls, so does ETH—especially when rival chains can offer transaction fees under a penny.

So why did Ethereum push so hard for its L2 strategy, rather than focusing on L1 scaling?

I think you can see the answer now.

This was a critical moment—Ethereum had to act fast to slow DeFi’s exodus, even if it meant sacrificing some of the mainnet’s centrality. So, a flurry of L2s burst onto the scene.

You had trailblazers like Arbitrum, Optimism, and ZK-rollups, institution-led chains like Base, Mantle, and OPBNB, layer-2s aiming to become “mother chains” like Metis, fresh ideas from projects like Taiko, and app-driven ones like Uni.

Ethereum didn’t need a slow, complex rollout—it needed a quick, simple, even desperate expansion. And that’s what L2 delivered.

And it worked. L2s reinforced the value of the EVM, preventing a mass exodus of DeFi developers due to high fees.

To keep things in perspective—while funds and users may have left the ETH mainnet, at least:

(1) They didn’t flee to rival ecosystems; and

(2) They didn’t create more direct competitors.

Just imagine: without L2s, Coinbase would almost certainly have launched its own standalone chain—that’s human nature. But thanks to L2s, at least in name, platforms like Base and Uni still recognize Ethereum as their “home base.”

As long as the EVM stands, Ethereum won’t lose.

[Era 3: The LST Era]

Now comes Ethereum’s third act, which has coincided with the weakest market cycle yet.

After the ICO and DeFi years, Ethereum entered the LST (Liquid Staking Token) era.

With the Shanghai upgrade, Ethereum’s PoS transition was finally complete. Lido and EtherFi soared in TVL, and a wave of ETH LST products mushroomed across the ecosystem.

Each new era carries the imprint of the last—just look at DeFillama: nearly all of the top DeFi protocols on Ethereum today are LST-focused or tightly linked with LSTs.

Source: DeFillama

So what are LST-linked protocols?

Take looping loans, for instance. EtherFi’s looping loans can easily deliver double-digit ETH-denominated returns (message me if you want to discuss specifics). But “lending” needs a place to borrow from; so massive TVL on platforms like AAVE and Morpho mainly comes from demand for looping loans. While they’re DeFi, I call them LST-linked protocols.

DeFi turbocharged LST growth, and now LSTs are DeFi’s biggest clients.

On a side note: Our company Ebunker was also founded during this period—September 15, 2022, which also marked Ethereum’s successful PoS merge.

Today, over 400,000 ETH have been staked in a non-custodial manner across our nodes—a decision I’m still proud of.

For every true ETH supporter, it’s about taking action to secure the network (for me, by running validator nodes).

Back to the main thread: If you’ve noticed, I keep emphasizing how major shifts in supply and demand drive ETH’s price.

But LSTs (including non-custodial staking) haven’t moved the needle. Lido’s ETH yield has hovered around 3%; EtherFi is a little higher at 3.5%—but that’s about it.

Not even EigenLayer or similar restaking projects have changed this basic rate.

It’s a bit like everyone waiting for the Fed to cut rates—this 3% baseline has even dampened economic activity on Ethereum’s virtual economy.

ETH gas fees have dropped (thanks in part to Layer 1 and Layer 2 improvements), but the level of on-chain economic activity remains sluggish.

It’s a repeat of the same supply-demand imbalance we’ve seen twice before in Ethereum’s history.

So, LSTs didn’t bring a “DeFi summer”—instead, they accompanied a steady decline in ETH price.

After all, a 3% yield isn’t a compelling reason for whales to accumulate ETH—it just slows their selling. Still, credit to the LST sector, since it’s led a lot of big holders to stake instead of selling ETH, which could have driven prices down to the $80 lows seen in 2019.

[Era 4: The Asset Era]

Luckily, after Bitcoin, Ethereum finally made it onto US spot ETF markets. This led to a short-lived hype wave and, more importantly, marked the beginning of Ethereum’s fourth major act: the Asset Era.

The road from fringe to mainstream asset is a long one. As the ETH/BTC ratio slid below 0.02, Ethereum faced its third big “moment of doubt.”

The whole ecosystem should really thank Michael Saylor for pioneering the MicroStrategy playbook.

Corporations first buy BTC or ETH, then use those assets to back new stock or debt offerings—raising more money to buy even more BTC or ETH, which leads to even more stock or bond issuances, and so on.

MicroStrategy’s success with Bitcoin inspired the Ethereum community.

Crypto VC circles led by Consensys (like Sharplink), and traditional funds like Bitmine (backed by Cathie Wood), all began fighting for the title of “Ethereum’s MicroStrategy.”

They—and a slew of copycats—sparked a new resonance between the US stock market and crypto.

Once again, supply and demand shifted in ETH’s favor.

Institutions started buying ETH in size, and, just as before, the LST era laid a foundation—massive ETH was staked, locking up floating supply and fueling the latest crypto-stock market FOMO.

This wave also owes a lot to Ethereum’s longstanding reputation with both crypto insiders and traditional finance.

Vitalik Buterin never flaunted wealth or endorsed scam coins—instead, he’s always focused on core technical progress for Ethereum, like ZKVM, privacy, and simplifying the L1 protocol.

He’s never even posted about sbet or Bitmine on Twitter.

The fact that Ethereum was chosen by the market and entered this fourth era is a testament to years’ worth of technical credibility and community reputation built by both Ethereum and Vitalik.

Vitalik’s values are a big reason I personally resonate so strongly with Ethereum’s mission.

[Final Thoughts]

As Binji put it, Ethereum’s network has now run flawlessly for 10 years—3,650 days and nights—without interruption or maintenance windows.

During this period:

- Facebook suffered a 14-hour global outage;

- AWS Kinesis was offline for 17 hours;

- Cloudflare shut down 19 data centers.

Ethereum’s resilience is truly awe-inspiring.

I hope—and fully expect—to still be on Twitter, analyzing Ethereum, ten years from now.

Happy 10th anniversary, Ethereum!

Feel free to share your thoughts about Ethereum in the comments—I strive to respond to all feedback.

And of course, simple “happy birthday” wishes are always welcome, too.

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