What’s up Vigilantes, It’s Eoin back at it again! Last time, your friendly neighborhood Editor-N-Chief (M. Scott Russell) brought me on to discuss “How Ethereum works with blockchain technology with a decentralized network”.

Now you might be wondering how Ethereum made its way to be the successful platform it is today. I can tell you now, the path wasn’t a smooth one.

Ethereum began in 2013 as an Idea by Vitalik Buterin, who proposed the idea. Vitalik hosted a crowdfunding event. The event was used to fund the project where 60 million Ether were created and sold.

Ether (ETH) is the official cryptocurrency of the Ethereum platform. Over 50 million Ether were sold, equal to about 31,500 bitcoin. This capital helped fund Ethereum projects throughout the next few years.

Ethereum officially launched in May 2015 with the first version known as “Olympic”. This version was still in testing mode, meaning that select few developers had access to the platform.

During this time, Vitalik offered a 25,000 ETH reward (worth $5,595,250.00 as of the time of this writing) to people who spent a lot of time stress testing the network, thus came many developers who actively were trying to overload the network through various methods.

After Olympic came “Frontier” in July of 2015. This was the first official version launched to the public. Ethereum, of course, was still in very early development and was prone to many changes and improvements in the future. Frontier included many changes from Olympic including the implementation of “gas” and block rewards (5 ETH for each new block mined).

Frontier also did not have an interactive GUI yet. Every action was done through command lines. The Ui was rough but usable. However, this made it difficult for newer developers not familiar with Ethereum yet to adapt.

Newer improvements were made with various changes that improved the platform including “Homestead” in 2016 and “Metropolis” in 2017. These introduced changes to the platform programming language called “solidity” and other changes including smart contracts and continuing to eliminate aspects of a centralized network.

In 2016, Ethereum split into two platforms. Ethereum and Ethereum Classic were born due to a large dispute within the Ethereum community after over $50 million were stolen due to a security error within the DAO. The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) was a kind of adventure capital fun ran on the decentralized platform.

People loved this idea but for the project to work, they needed people to fund the development. The idea was so popular that about $150 million was raised in just 28 days. Unfortunately, there was an error in the security of the code in the DAO and the wallet was hacked.

SIDENOTE: The hack was due to an error in judgement on behalf of Slock.it COO Stephan Tual who didn’t take into account that anyone would want to steal money. In the end, it was recovered due to the fact that each unit is traceable and as soon as the hacker tried to sell it on the market, the system flagged it.

The hacker was primed to receive the money in 28 days and the Ethereum community had to act fast and decide what step to take to ensure it didn’t happen again. This is when the controversial decision was made to hardfork the entire Ethereum platform.

Hard fork means separating from the blockchain from a certain point in an attempt to upgrade it and abandoning the old chain. In many cases, a hard fork is performed by somebody who wishes to create a new platform or a new cryptocurrency with different rules from the existing one.

Hard forks are the opposite of the less radical option that keeps the same platform called a soft fork. A soft fork doesn’t alter anything on the blockchain, unlike the hardfork. Many people didn’t want the hardfork and thought that the platform was fine how it is but this would mean the $50 million would be lost.

Those who didn’t want the hardfork stayed on the original platform and those who did would have to upgrade to the entirely new platform. This caused a large split in the community and so Ethereum Classic was born. Ethereum and a majority of developers moved on and Ethereum climbed up the scale in success.

Although the split in the community caused investors to question the security of the platform, the platform proceeded to progress throughout the years. The value of Ethereum’s cryptocurrency increased by over 10000% since the launch of the platform and Ehtereum is now the largest programmable blockchain.

As you may know, CryptoComics lies on the Ethereum platform and therefore a contributor to the platforms incredible road to success.

I was just in M. Scott Russell’s office and he was hard at work on an article for you guys about how secure cryptocurrency really is. He is taking an honest approach to it so be on the lookout for that in the near future.

Until that article comes out, check out that great marketplace that everyone at CryptoComics is building. I love the fact that it is already evolving. Its where I am getting all my comics.