Ethereum Mainnet's 10th Anniversary: Key Figures from the Genesis Team to the Decentralized Community

On July 30, 2025, Ethereum will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its Mainnet launch. As a representative project of blockchain technology, Ethereum has not only changed the landscape of cryptocurrency but also provided a powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications. The price of ETH is attempting to break through the four-year resistance level established since 2021, aiming for $4000 at this significant moment. On that day, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and core contributors such as Tim Beiko, Joseph Lubin, Tomasz Stańczak, and Hsiao-wei Wang will deliver speeches during the live broadcast of the tenth-anniversary celebration.

Looking back on the ten-year development journey of Ethereum, from the founding team to the rise of a decentralized community, there is a group of idealistic and talented key figures behind it. Their coming together and parting not only shaped the present of Ethereum but also influenced the future of the entire blockchain industry.

The Starting Point of Ethereum

In 2013, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin proposed an ambitious idea: to create a Turing-complete blockchain platform to support the development of decentralized applications. This idea attracted Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit to join and form the initial team of the Ethereum project. Soon after, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke also joined, forming the "Genesis Team." However, the differences in ideology and goals eventually led to the later split.

Vitalik Buterin

As the founder and spiritual leader of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin's life trajectory is closely tied to the world of cryptocurrency. At the age of 6, he immigrated to Canada with his family and early on displayed extraordinary talent in mathematics, programming, and economics. At 17, he learned about Bitcoin from his father, Dmitry Buterin, who is a computer scientist. Interestingly, Vitalik mentioned that one of his motivations for creating Ethereum stemmed from Blizzard's weakening of the skills of his beloved warlock character in World of Warcraft in 2010, which made him deeply aware of the downsides of centralized services.

In 2011, in order to earn Bitcoin, he began writing for blogs, and as a result, he met Mihai Alisie. Together, they founded "Bitcoin Magazine", the first serious publication focused on cryptocurrency, and perhaps due to this experience, he became deeply involved in the crypto world. In 2013, after visiting multiple crypto projects around the globe, he felt that Bitcoin's functionalities were too limited, and thus published the Ethereum white paper, proposing the concept of a Turing-complete blockchain platform. In 2014, he received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship established by Peter Thiel, and subsequently dropped out of the University of Waterloo to devote himself full-time to the development of Ethereum.

As the captain of Ethereum, Vitalik continues to lead the evolution of the technological roadmap. On September 15, 2022, Ethereum successfully completed "The Merge," transitioning from the PoW consensus mechanism to PoS, reducing energy consumption by 99%. Vitalik stated: "Our long-standing dream has finally come true." On April 12, 2023, the Shapella upgrade was completed, allowing stakers to withdraw their ETH for the first time. On June 9 of the same year, he published a blog post titled "The Three Transitions," proposing three major shifts that Ethereum must undergo for future maturity: L2 scaling, wallet security (transitioning to smart contract wallets), and privacy protection. He emphasized that if true decentralization and privacy protection cannot be achieved, Ethereum may repeat past mistakes.

Recently, Vitalik's thoughts have become increasingly profound. In June 2025, at the ETHGlobal Prague conference, he stated that Ethereum L1 would achieve approximately 10 times scalability within a year. On July 2, at the EthCC conference in France, he once again warned that if decentralization only remains a slogan, Ethereum will face a survival crisis, and proposed three core standards to test decentralization. On July 27, as the tenth anniversary of the Ethereum mainnet approaches, he reposted on social media a post stating "Ethereum has been running stably for ten years with zero downtime," showcasing the achievements of the Ethereum network.

In addition to his technical contributions, Vitalik is also actively involved in charitable causes, donating billions of dollars worth of crypto assets to organizations such as the SENS Research Foundation, the COVID relief fund in India, and humanitarian aid in Ukraine. At the same time, he expresses deep concerns about the potential risks of AI, believing that superintelligent AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, and advocates for a "d/acc" technology development philosophy that emphasizes defense, decentralization, and democracy.

Charles Hoskinson

Charles Hoskinson was the CEO of Ethereum. He studied mathematics at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder in his early years, and in 2013 he founded the "Bitcoin Education Project."

At the end of 2013, he co-founded Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin and others. However, he had fundamental disagreements with Vitalik regarding the direction of the project. Hoskinson advocated for Ethereum to establish a commercial company and bring in venture capital, arguing that "a horizontal power structure, where janitors and executives are on equal footing, is simply insane." Vitalik, on the other hand, insisted on a non-profit and decentralized path. This ideological conflict ultimately led to Hoskinson being "removed" from the team in 2014 and leaving in anger.

After leaving Ethereum, Hoskinson did not become despondent. At the end of 2014, he co-founded the blockchain engineering and research company IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong) with former Ethereum colleague Jeremy Wood. IOHK's flagship project is the public chain platform Cardano (ADA), which stands out in the industry for its rigorous academic research style and peer review mechanism, earning it the titles of "Japan's Ethereum" or the first generation "Ethereum killer." It still holds a position among the top ten by market capitalization today. Hoskinson insists that Cardano does not accept venture capital, believing that it contradicts the principle of decentralization in blockchain.

In recent years, Hoskinson has remained active at the forefront of the industry and often makes bold predictions. He recently stated that the price of Bitcoin could grow tenfold to $1 million, while he believes that Cardano (ADA) has even greater growth potential, possibly rising by 100 times or even 1,000 times.

In addition to his contributions to the cryptocurrency field, Hoskinson has also ventured into charity and politics. In 2021, he donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University to establish a Center for Formal Mathematics and funded a deep-sea exploration project by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. He also announced the establishment of a political action committee called "Wyoming Integrity" in February 2025.

Anthony Di Iorio

As a wealthy second-generation rich kid and angel investor, Anthony Di Iorio is one of the key figures who funded the launch of Ethereum. He learned about Bitcoin through a podcast in 2012 and quickly immersed himself in it. That same year, he organized a Bitcoin meetup in Toronto, where he met Vitalik Buterin and together they promoted the release of the Ethereum white paper.

Di Iorio's original intention to participate in Ethereum was to make money, so when the team ultimately decided in 2014 that Ethereum would operate on a non-profit model, he began to lose interest and gradually faded out of the core circle.

After leaving Ethereum, Di Iorio's business landscape did not stop expanding. In 2014, he founded the blockchain company Decentral in Toronto and launched the city's first two-way Bitcoin ATM, promoting the local application of cryptocurrency. In 2016, he founded the popular multi-currency wallet Jaxx Liberty. That same year, he was hired as the first Chief Digital Officer by the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), but soon left to focus on his own projects.

Although he stated in 2021 that he would not engage in the cryptocurrency space for personal safety reasons, it seems he has not completely withdrawn. He also launched the Andiami project in 2022, aimed at addressing centralization issues in decentralized networks through hardware, token economics, and game theory. Perhaps due to the hype surrounding Trump releasing the Trump Meme Coin, he became active again on social media, asking "When will Musk release a coin?" this January on a social platform, while also publishing a detailed report on the theft of $1.5 billion ETH from a trading platform, analyzing the history of the Ethereum DAO rollback.

At a certain conference, he stated that the original intention of Ethereum was not to become a competitor to Bitcoin, but rather to serve as an alternative, and he believes that Ethereum, due to its wide range of application scenarios, has the potential to surpass Bitcoin in market value.

From early astute investors to successful entrepreneurs, Anthony Di Iorio represents the pragmatic and business-driven side of the crypto world. Although he left the core of Ethereum early on, his early funding support was instrumental in the birth of Ethereum.

Amir Chetrit

Amir Chetrit is the most low-key and mysterious among the eight co-founders of Ethereum. He is a computer science enthusiast with dual citizenship in the United States and Israel, and he worked in the real estate industry in his early years.

In 2013, Chetrit met Vitalik Buterin at a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam and was invited to join the Ethereum project. At that time, he was involved in an Israeli startup called "Colored Coins," which aimed to manage real-world assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.

However, at the Swiss conference in June 2014, which decided the fate of Ethereum, Chetrit was questioned by other developers and co-founders due to his limited contributions to the project, ultimately agreeing to withdraw from the core team while retaining his status as a co-founder.

Since then, Amir Chetrit has rarely appeared in the public eye. According to insiders, Chetrit is currently quietly supporting multiple blockchain projects but seldom makes public appearances, and his personal style does not favor publicity.

Gavin Wood

As the first CTO of Ethereum, Gavin Wood is the key figure who transformed Vitalik Buterin's grand blueprint into real code. He possesses strong engineering capabilities and is known as Ethereum's "invisible brain."

In 2013, Gavin Wood met with Vitalik and others to embark on the journey of Ethereum together. He wrote the "Yellow Paper" that defined the technical specifications of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). In addition, he led the development of the smart contract programming language Solidity, laying a solid technical foundation for the entire Ethereum ecosystem. It can be said that without Gavin Wood, the realization of Ethereum would be out of the question.

However, just three months after the launch of the Ethereum Mainnet in 2015, Gavin Wood chose to leave. He had significant disagreements with Vitalik regarding the engineering management model; he believed the project required more efficient centralized management to advance, while Vitalik insisted on the community-driven model of Decentralization.

After leaving, Gavin Wood founded Parity Technologies in 2016. He then established the Web3 Foundation and created Polkadot ------ a cross-chain network aimed at connecting different blockchains. In October 2022, he