In honor of Ethereum's tenth anniversary, a comprehensive analysis of the top 10 contributions this revolutionary chain has made to the cryptocurrency industry.
These standards include its smart contracts, ERC-20, EVM, and other important standards, layer two protocols, governance of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), how they have impacted decentralized finance, initial coin offerings (ICOs), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), memecoins, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and more. Ethereum has given us so much.
10 years of Ethereum
Since Vitalik Buterin launched Ethereum ten years ago, smart contracts have become a core feature of its blockchain. Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, allows smart contracts, but Satoshi Nakamoto primarily focused on its decentralized trustless architecture.
On the other hand, Ethereum introduced the programming language 'Solidity', which is specifically designed for smart contracts. After ten years, it is difficult to determine the impact of Ethereum's smart contracts. They remain one of the strongest features of the blockchain, and other protocols have significantly diversified this space.
Although we cannot determine the number of existing ETH smart contracts at the moment, the massive growth in unique addresses is conclusive evidence. The EVM standard (Ethereum Virtual Machine) has contributed to the flourishing of smart contracts. The EVM standard controls how these protocols operate, process transactions, monitor the overall ETH ecosystem, and much more.
This standard helps run Ethereum for users around the world, opening new possibilities for decentralized finance.
Ethereum is revolutionizing token minting.
The ERC-20 standard is one of the most important contributions of Ethereum over the past decade. Before ERC-20, the process of creating tokens on the blockchain was fragmented and inconsistent. By standardizing new rules among tokens, Ethereum paved the way for making over a million assets unified, interchangeable, and compatible with each other.
Thanks to the ERC-20 standard, Ethereum is the preferred Tether blockchain for minting USDT tokens. USDT is the most popular stablecoin in the world, which is impressive. Academic research has tried to measure the impact of this standard on the cryptocurrency industry, but it has been undoubtedly positive.
Furthermore, Ethereum's ability to host layer two protocols has revolutionized the field over the past decade. These protocols can contribute to building solutions for many problems, especially scalability, within the framework of traditional blockchains.
Today, even Bitcoin has a variety of L2 protocols, but Ethereum specialized in them first.
The rise of initial coin offerings (ICOs) and the groundwork for decentralized finance (DeFi).
One of the most important benefits of the ERC-20 standard was the rise of initial coin offerings (ICOs) in the late 2010s. Thanks to this new standard, protocols like ChainLink and Basic Attention Token used it to launch their respective LINK and BAT tokens.
Today, some of these protocols have outperformed Ethereum in development activity, highlighting its significance over the past decade. Thanks to these technological improvements, its active community, and its ability to host decentralized trading platforms, it can be said that Ethereum is the cradle of decentralized finance (DeFi).
Its tools and infrastructure have enabled a community to develop a practically trustless economic infrastructure. Its model for decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance has also achieved unprecedented financial democracy.
Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs, shared some insights about Ethereum's impact on DeFi.
The total value locked in the Ethereum blockchain has significantly increased over the past decade:
NFTs, Memecoins, ETFs, and more.
These factors have come together to make Ethereum the foremost home for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which were rare a decade ago. By combining self-executing smart contracts, the decentralized finance (DeFi) community, and some new token standards, Ethereum became the essence of the NFT boom in 2021.
These products remain important even today, further showcasing Ethereum's impact. Although Dogecoin was the first memecoin, launched over a decade ago, Ethereum's Shiba Inu revived the sector.
The two currencies appeared similar, but the infrastructure of Ethereum's decentralized finance (DeFi) community made a qualitative leap. Ethereum developers did not directly create memecoins, but their work was essential in the meme sector that we know and love today.
Finally, Ethereum came in second strongly in another key area. Bitcoin received approval for the first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the United States, followed by Ethereum a few months later. This approval indicated that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), led by Gary Gensler, would allow additional products from alternative cryptocurrencies, and is now witnessing a wave of active applications.
Moreover, ETH exchange-traded funds are currently outperforming BTC exchange-traded funds. In short, Ethereum has contributed greatly to cryptocurrency over the past decade. It has proven to represent a qualitative leap from Bitcoin, thanks to many features that have allowed for an entirely new world.
Ethereum has impacted all aspects of the cryptocurrency community, in the past and present. Given its current adoption, it is likely that the blockchain technology's contribution to the cryptocurrency economy will remain vital for years or decades to come.