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

On July 30, 2025, Ethereum will celebrate the important milestone of 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 strong infrastructure for decentralized applications. At this significant moment, the price of ETH is also trying to break through the four-year resistance level since 2021, aiming for a surge towards $4000.

Looking back at the ten-year development of Ethereum, from the genesis group of eight to the rise of a decentralized community, behind it is a group of idealistic and talented key figures. Their coming together and parting shaped the present of Ethereum and also influenced the future of the entire blockchain industry.

The Starting Point of Ethereum

In 2013, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin proposed a bold 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, forming the initial team of the Ethereum project. Soon after, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke also joined, forming the "Ethereum Genesis Group."

Vitalik Buterin

As the founder and spiritual leader of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin's life trajectory is closely linked to the crypto world. At the age of 17, he learned about Bitcoin from his father, who was a computer scientist. In 2013, after visiting various crypto projects around the world, he believed that Bitcoin's functionality was too limited, so he released the Ethereum white paper, proposing the concept of a Turing-complete blockchain platform.

Vitalik continues to lead the evolution of the technical roadmap. On September 15, 2022, Ethereum successfully completed "The Merge," transitioning from a PoW consensus mechanism to PoS, reducing energy consumption by 99%. 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," outlining the three major transformations that Ethereum must undergo for future maturity: L2 scaling, wallet security, and privacy protection.

Recently, Vitalik's thoughts have become increasingly profound. In June 2025, he stated at the ETHGlobal Prague conference that Ethereum L1 would achieve approximately 10x scalability within a year. On July 2, at the EthCC conference in France, he warned again that if decentralization remains merely a slogan, Ethereum will face a survival crisis, and he proposed three core criteria to test decentralization.

Charles Hoskinson

Charles Hoskinson served as the CEO of Ethereum but had fundamental disagreements with Vitalik regarding the project's development direction. Hoskinson advocated for Ethereum to establish a commercial company and introduce venture capital, while Vitalik insisted on a non-profit and decentralized approach. This ideological conflict ultimately led to Hoskinson being "removed" from the team in 2014.

After leaving Ethereum, Hoskinson co-founded the blockchain engineering and research company IOHK 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."

In recent years, Hoskinson has remained active at the forefront of the industry. He recently stated that the price of Bitcoin could increase tenfold to one million dollars, while he believes that Cardano (ADA) has even greater growth potential, potentially rising by 100 times or even 1000 times.

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.

Di Iorio's initial intention to participate in Ethereum was to make money. Therefore, when the team ultimately decided in 2014 that Ethereum would operate on a non-profit model, he felt disheartened and gradually faded out of the core circle thereafter.

After leaving Ethereum, Di Iorio founded the blockchain company Decentral and launched the popular multi-currency wallet Jaxx Liberty. Although he expressed in 2021 that he would no longer be involved in the cryptocurrency space for personal safety reasons, it seems he has not completely stepped away. He initiated the Andiami project in 2022, aiming to address the centralization issues in decentralized networks through hardware, token economics, and game theory.

At the Consensus 2025 conference, he stated that the original intention of Ethereum was not to compete with Bitcoin, but to serve as an alternative. He believes that Ethereum, due to its wide range of application scenarios, has the potential to surpass Bitcoin in market capitalization.

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 previously worked in the real estate industry.

In 2013, Chetrit met Vitalik Buterin at a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam and was invited to join the Ethereum project. However, at the decisive Swiss conference in June 2014 that determined the fate of Ethereum, Chetrit was questioned by other developers and co-founders due to his limited contributions to the project, ultimately agreeing to leave the core team while still retaining his title as 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, as his personal style does not favor promotion.

Gavin Wood

As the first CTO of Ethereum, Gavin Wood is the key figure in transforming Vitalik Buterin's grand blueprint into real code. He wrote the "Yellow Paper" that defines the technical specifications of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and he also led the development of the smart contract programming language Solidity, laying a solid technological foundation for the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

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, believing the project needed more efficient centralized management to advance, while Vitalik insisted again on the community-driven model of Decentralization.

After leaving, Gavin Wood founded Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation, and created Polkadot. In April 2024, he published a white paper for a new generation architecture of Polkadot called JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine). In June of this year, Gavin Wood stated in a forum post that he has no intention of issuing a new token based on the JAM protocol.

Joseph Lubin

Joseph Lubin is the one with the strongest business background among the eight co-founders of Ethereum. After Ethereum established a non-profit model in 2014, Lubin chose not to participate in core development any longer. However, his departure was not a break, but rather a deeper involvement in and contribution to the Ethereum ecosystem in another way. In 2015, he founded ConsenSys, a software technology company and incubator focused on the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the past decade, ConsenSys has become the most important and productive force in the Ethereum ecosystem. It has incubated a large number of blockchain startups and contributed countless critical infrastructures and applications to Ethereum, among which the most successful are the wallet MetaMask, with hundreds of millions of users, and the developer tools Infura and Truffle.

Recently, the movements of Lubin and ConsenSys have attracted much attention. On May 27, ConsenSys led a private fundraising round of approximately $425 million for SharpLink Gaming, with Lubin serving as the chairman of its board. Currently, Linea has announced a 10% token allocation for early contributors, with 9% airdropped to users participating in Linea voyages.

Mihai Alisie

Mihai Alisie was Vitalik Buterin's closest ally even before the birth of Ethereum. In 2011, he co-founded "Bitcoin Magazine" with Vitalik and served as editor-in-chief until the end of 2013.

In the early stages of the Ethereum project, Alisie played a crucial role. He was responsible for establishing the necessary business infrastructure and legal framework for the project in Switzerland, and successfully promoted the presale activities of Ethereum, with the team raising over 31,000 Bitcoins (worth approximately $18 million at the time) through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

Unlike the intense departure of Hoskinson and others, Alisie's exit was relatively peaceful. After Ethereum got on track, he chose to pursue his ideals. In 2015, he founded the decentralized social project Akasha based on Ethereum and IPFS, continuing to shine in the ecosystem.

To this day, Mihai Alisie still has his heart set on Ethereum. On the occasion of Ethereum's tenth anniversary, he posted on social media on July 23 to celebrate and, in collaboration with ETHGlobal, POAP, and others, initiated activities to encourage community members to share their stories with Ethereum.

Jeffrey Wilcke

In the early technical implementation of Ethereum, Jeffrey Wilcke was a key force alongside Gavin Wood. His development of the Go Ethereum client, known as Geth, became the most essential and widely used client software for Ethereum, and it remains a pillar of the network's operation to this day.

However, after experiencing the Ethereum hard fork, a series of hacking incidents, and the birth of his son, Wilcke felt physically and mentally exhausted, choosing to hand over the maintenance and supervision of Geth to his capable assistant Péter Szilágyi, gradually stepping back from frontline development.

Nevertheless, as an early core contributor and a large holder of ETH, Wilcke's wealth movement remains a focal point of market attention. For instance, after a period of silence in his wallet for several months, he transferred approximately $262 million worth of ETH to a trading platform in May. Since 2016, Wilcke has transferred a total of 394,000 ETH to this platform, with an average selling price of $1,295, totaling around $510 million in cashing out.

Next Generation Core: Guardians and Engineers of PoS

As the founding figures gradually fade away, Ethereum does not stop its progress. A new generation of developers and researchers has taken up the torch, leading this "world computer" towards a broader future.

Danny Ryan

Danny Ryan is not a member of the original eight, but as a former core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, he played a crucial leadership role in key upgrades such as Proof of Stake (PoS) and The Merge, being regarded as a core figure of the new generation of leadership.

Ryan served as the chief coordinator for the Ethereum The Merge upgrade and oversaw the launch of the Beacon Chain in 2021. In February 2023, he published a far-reaching article that deeply reflected on Ethereum's survival issues regarding technical roadmap, MEV challenges, L1 coordination governance, protocol hardening, and L2 ecosystem alignment.

In September 2024, after seven years working on Ethereum, Danny Ryan announced his departure from the Ethereum Foundation for personal reasons. However, his influence did not wane. In March 2025, Ryan announced that he was joining Etherealize, which focuses on institutional adoption, as a co-founder, helping Ethereum grow in a new way. His return was seen as a major boon by the community.

Vlad Zamfir

As an early core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, Vlad Zamfir is one of the pioneers in the study of the PoS consensus mechanism. His research on the Casper protocol, particularly CBC Casper, laid an important theoretical foundation for Ethereum's eventual transition to PoS.

Zamfir is known for his profound yet sometimes radical views.