Ethereum was described in Vitalik Buterin's 2013 whitepaper, which can be found at: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper. He talked about the need of a scripting language that would run on top of Bitcoin, since he was involved in Bitcoin Magazine and he understood the limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain.
He saw an opportunity to create a platform that would run on decentralized technology to create new types of applications.
Not many believed in his vision, so he decided to create an entire new blockchain by himself with a small team that saw the potential in Vitalik's ideas. He founded the Ethereum Switzerland group and decided to run an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in July 2014, where he sold Ether in exchange for Bitcoin, raising a total of about $18 million dollars.
He created the smart contracts technology, which is basically programs that run by themselves without requiring a trusted entity to execute them. They are always available, and they run without failure.
The fact that Ethereum provided a system that allows people to create their own applications on top of a blockchain is what made it successful. Before Ethereum, there was no simple way to create decentralized applications (dApps) in a decentralized platform. Bitcoin has a protocol to create simple applications using opcodes with a programming language called Script, but it's not capable of much since it is very low level and it's limited by the block size.
The development of Ethereum was planned to be done in four different stages, with major changes in each one:
- Frontier
- Homestead
- Metropolis
- Serenity
It was used to deliver and research innovative solutions as they were required, with a hard fork for functionality that is not backward compatible. In 2015, Frontier was launched as the first version of Ethereum. A year later, Homestead was launched, which included many improvements and made Ethereum a capable system with enough power to process smart contracts.
One of the biggest ICOs conducted on top of Ethereum was the decentralized autonomous organization ICO, also known as the DAO, which raised $150 million dollars with contributions from more than 11,000 people. The problem is that it got hacked by an unknown group of individuals that moved the funds to a different DAO. Interestingly enough, a group of programmers known as the White Hat Group saw the hack happening and extracted as many funds as possible into a separate decentralized organization known as the White Hat DAO, where they stored people's money to distribute them later.
This event originated a heated debate in the community that caused Ethereum to be divided in two groups, where some believed in the fact that Ethereum must be immutable and shouldn't be modified, while others believed in a hard fork to revert the damage done.
That was the beginning of Ethereum Classic and Ethereum as we know it. Ethereum Classic has a noticeable smaller user base, but it preserves the initial immutability ideals that they consider essential for a blockchain. In March 2017, several companies joined efforts to create the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA), which is currently a non-profit organization made of more than 500 members whose goal is as follows:
"To create open-source, standards-based blockchain specifications."
-Ethereum Enterprise Alliance
In other words, they created a group of people collaborating on solutions for future blockchains to come, so that they are better, faster, and more capable.
It suffered from several hacks, where millions of dollars were stolen. They had to do a hard fork to save people's funds and have a notorious price volatility, but the future looks bright and it continues, improve as demand increases.
![]()
The EEA (entethalliance.org) is one of the most exciting projects being developed by the core Ethereum team, because they intend to help companies from all over the world to benefit from decentralized technology. By learning about this project, you'll be well positioned when it comes to working as an EEA expert.
In this section, we will cover the following topics:
- The EEA's vision
- The EEA membership
- The EEA architecture
Vitalik funded the organization because he received a huge demand from executives to create software that could be used in big companies to handle demanding dApps. Those companies now want to build a private version of Ethereum to fulfill their research and development needs.
What's interesting about this initiative is that they work with hundreds of companies to research and develop solutions that are shared across them. For instance, if a company member of the EEA creates a new implementation protocol for better and faster dApps, they will share it with the other members so that they can also benefit from this cutting-edge research, while together growing the Ethereum ecosystem.
![]()
The EEA's four big public goals that they envision they will achieve in the longer term are as follows:
- Be an open source standard, not a product:
They only work with open source code that can be shared with anybody publicly without restrictions in order to spread development advances that may or may not help others improve their blockchain products. You see, they are a non-profit organization that wants to move blockchain (as we know it) further by combining the efforts of many companies interested in private blockchain solutions.
- Address enterprise development requirements:
The EEA helps companies incorporate the new innovations that are being discovered by others for free, so that they can enjoy the benefits of the latest requirements.
- Share improvements between public and private Ethereum:
They want to improve what they are building by taking improvements from the public blockchain so that they can evolve faster while keeping a great product in mind.
- Leverage existing standards:
When it comes to the blockchain technology, much is left to research and discover. Many problems regarding scalability, security, and transparency are being studied, since this type of decentralized structure is new to modern computing. So, the idea is to learn from existing standards, such as proof-of-stake (PoS), to improve faster than anyone else.
In essence, they are trying to fulfill the demands that many companies are making regarding privat...
