Past, Present, Future: Five Years of the Ethereum Network
Editor's Note: This article comes fromGolden Finance, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Golden Finance
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum network was officially released.
In 5 years, the old look has been changed. On the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the launch of the Ethereum network in 2020, Jinse Finance found that data shows that it is more popular than ever.
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According to Xangle’s latest research on decentralized finance (DeFi), transaction volumes and fees on the Ethereum network recorded huge growth in the second quarter of 2020. Daily volume soared 61.7%, with more than 1 million traded, reaching a 52-week high on June 23 and approaching an all-time high. On the other hand, transaction fees surged 687.9%. The move is similar to the surge during the bull market in late 2017 and early 2018, Xangle said. DeFi has been the hottest niche in the cryptocurrency industry since the start of Q2, with the total value locked (TVL) of DeFi protocols tripling to over $3.5 billion in the past few months. Interestingly, since January 2018, the total value locked has increased by 2524%.
Recently, with Ethereum’s recent price above $300, there are now more profitable addresses in ETH than the total number of addresses holding any amount of Bitcoin. Statistics show that the total number of profitable ETH addresses is 31.86 million, while the total number of Bitcoin balances is 30.83 million. The number of ethereum “hoarders” (i.e., people holding assets for more than a year) has also increased by 10 million over the past 12 months.
According to the latest report released by encryption market analysis company Messari, there are currently 178 assets on the Ethereum network with a total market value of $63.7 billion. Including stablecoins, 124 assets have achieved positive returns during the year, which means that despite the impact of the global economy during the new crown pneumonia epidemic, 70% of ether assets have appreciated in value. Among them, a third of tokens more than doubled their market value, and 10 tokens recorded gains of more than 500%, including major distributed financial protocols Bancor (BNT) and Kyber Network (KNC). ETH itself ranks 41st among the strongest performing assets, with a year-to-date gain of 142%.
In addition, Cointelegraph issued an article stating that by comparing the total number of addresses created by the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchain networks in the five years before launch, it can be seen that the usage and growth rate of Ethereum is much faster than Bitcoin. While the number of addresses is a good measure of usage, this metric may not be perfect for various reasons. One reason is that the computing systems of the two networks are different. During the first 600 days, the growth rates of both networks were very similar. However, by mid-2017, Ethereum's growth rate was more pronounced. The most obvious explanation is the ICO boom. The creation and subsequent issuance and trading of thousands of ERC20 tokens resulted in a greatly increased rate of Ethereum address creation. Another advantage that Ethereum has had from the beginning is that it stands on the shoulders of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the world's first decentralized electronic currency. Bitcoin adoption is slow and gradual. The slope of its curve has never risen like it did during the ICO boom.
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In the future, Ethereum 2.0 is approaching
The official Ethereum network was released on July 30, 2015, marking the official operation of the Ethereum blockchain. At the beginning of its birth, the Ethereum team planned a 3-5-year path for its development, which is divided into four stages: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity.
Phase 1: Frontier: Released July 30, 2015.
Phase 2: Homestead: Released March 14, 2016.
Phase 4: Serenity Tranquility: Release time TBD.
The first three stages are the 1.0 period of Ethereum, based on the POW consensus mechanism, and the last stage is Ethereum 2.0, which will eventually be upgraded from POW to POS consensus mechanism.
Currently, the network is also slowly moving to Proof of Stake (POS). Following the Constantinople hard fork in February, Ethereum is now approaching its much-anticipated Serenity update.
The data shows that on July 30, 381,504 ETHs have been pledged to the Ethereum 2.0 test network, and 4,462 verifiers (142,784 ETHs) are needed before the launch. It was previously reported that the Ethereum multi-client test network Medalla will be launched at 9:00 pm on August 4, Beijing time. At that time, no less than 16,384 verification nodes will be required, that is, 524,288 ETH will be deposited.
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Review of the past, three major stages
Phase 1: Frontier
On July 30, 2015, Frontier, the initial version of the Ethereum network, was released on a block with a height of 0. The genesis block contains 8,893 transactions, which come from transaction addresses that have participated in crowdfunding since the public sale of ETH in 2014 and addresses of the Ethereum Foundation.
Frontier is the original state of Ethereum. The development team positions it as a Beta version. It is not a safe and reliable network. The experience and functions are also very simple, which can be described as rough. Overall, its main functions are as follows:
1. Mining function: Provides a mining interface and stipulates the blockchain reward policy: after miners dig out a new block and get it confirmed, they can get 5 ETH rewards.
2. Restricted transaction function: Provides methods for uploading and executing contracts, but the gas limit of each block is hard-coded to 5000, which means that large-scale development and transactions on Ethereum are restricted during this period. In the next few days, after the miners operate and use the network normally, the upper limit of gas is automatically lifted, and the Ethereum network can process transactions and execute contracts as expected.
3. Centralized protection measures: A canary contract called Canary Contracts is used to promptly remind and prevent wrong operations or invalid transactions in the network, so as to prevent users from operating on invalid chains. This is a centralized mechanism. In the early days of Ethereum, it played a necessary role in protecting the safe operation of the network.
4. Poor usability experience: The Ethereum network at the cutting-edge stage has no graphical operation interface, and all client operations can only be realized through the command line. This rough operation interface is very unfriendly to ordinary users, so the Ethereum network at the beginning Square users are limited to developers who are familiar with the code.
It can be seen that the goal of Ethereum in this period is to provide a normally operating blockchain network, create a usable environment, allow mining and transactions to operate, and allow developers to test various distributed DAPPs and carry out pioneering Primal exploration.
Although Frontier is only a public beta version, its performance has exceeded people's expectations. A large number of miners entered the network to start mining and received token rewards. They improved the computing power of the Ethereum network and improved the ability to resist hacker attacks. Frontier is the first milestone in the development history of Ethereum.
Phase Two: Homestead: Homestead
On March 14, 2016, the pi day, Ethereum released the second phase of Homestead. It is the first hard fork plan of the Ethereum version, which occurs at a height of 1,150,000 blocks. Because the version after the hard fork is not compatible with the previous version, all nodes must complete the version upgrade before the fork in order to be consistent with the main chain data.
This is the first stable network of Ethereum, which marks that Ethereum can run smoothly and is no longer an insecure and unreliable network. But in terms of technology, compared with Frontier, there is no particularly obvious breakthrough. Major improvements in this phase include:
1. Cancel the canary contract: Remove the centralized functions and mechanisms on the Ethereum blockchain.
2. Introducing the Mist wallet: The Mist wallet client with a graphical interface is provided, allowing users to hold or trade ETH conveniently. Ethereum is no longer a development tool only for technical personnel, ordinary users can also experience and use Ethereum conveniently.
It is worth mentioning that Homestead is the first official and stable network of Ethereum. Two months after the release of this stage, the Ethereum Developers Conference DEVCON-2 was held in Shanghai, China on June 16. The theme of the conference Focus on smart contracts and network security. However, the most serious hacking incident in the history of the blockchain occurred the next day: The DAO attack that shocked the currency circle. Because the smart contract vulnerability written by The DAO project was successfully attacked by hackers, 3.6 million ETH was stolen. ETH finally won the vote of the majority of community members to forcibly implement a hard fork. Losses to participants. However, those who did not approve of the fork still stayed on the original original chain for mining and trading, which was the ETC that later became Ethereum Classic, and Ethereum was split into two.
Stage 3: Metropolis: Metropolis
Metropolis is divided into two phases: Byzantium and Constantinople, and the technology will be upgraded through two hard forks.
The Byzantine plan was activated at block 4370000 on October 16, 2017, successfully completing the fork. The upgrades it involves mainly include:
1. Adjust the formula for block difficulty evaluation: It stipulates that the block height cannot be forcibly increased by manipulating uncle blocks, which increases the difficulty of mining and ensures the stability of block generation speed.
2. Adjust mining rewards: Mining revenue is reduced from 5 ETH to 3 per block.
3. Delayed detonation of the "difficulty bomb" (Difficulty Bomb): In order to smoothly transition the consensus mechanism of Ethereum from PoW to PoS, Ethereum planned a "difficulty bomb" that gradually increased the difficulty of digging out new blocks during the transition period in September 2015. "mechanism. According to this mechanism, in the later stage of PoW, the difficulty of mining will increase to the point that new blocks cannot be generated, and the Ethereum network will be frozen to form an "ice age". The purpose is to eventually eliminate the PoW mechanism and prevent miners from continuing to work on the old PoW chain to generate two independent chains, resulting in a split in the community. The Byzantine upgrade delayed the "difficulty bomb" plan by 1 year.
After several delays, the Constantinople hard fork was triggered on February 28, 2019 at block 7,280,000.
The Constantinople upgrade includes a total of five improved protocols, namely EIP 1234, EIP145, EIP 1014, EIP 1052, and EIP 1283. The more important ones include:
1. Optimized the gas cost: reduce the gas consumption of the SStore operation code, and the Ethereum virtual machine allows dApp developers to optimize certain operations to save gas. Improved scalability of the Ethereum network.
