Ethereum Officially Launches

Around two years after the release of Vitalik Buterin’s Whitepaper, on July 30, 2015, Ethereum initiated its launch process with its genesis block. This release was known as “Frontier” and marked Ethereum’s experimental beginnings. A key breakthrough in this release was the first instance of a working smart contract nearly twenty years after they were theoretically proposed by Nick Szabo. Ethereum’s contracts run in the Ethereum Virtual Machine; the ERC-20 token interface followed in November 2015. These “smart contract” are automatically-executing, based on algorithmic processes and inscribed on the blockchain, distinguishing Ethereum’s capabilities from Bitcoin.