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On July 30, it was 11 years since the launch of the Ethereum mainnet. On this day in 2015, the so-called Genesis Block was formed, i.e., the very first block of transactions in the Ethereum blockchain. The cryptocurrency $ETH remains the second largest by market capitalization after Bitcoin, with a figure of over $230 billion as of mid-2026.
The first technical description of the Ethereum concept was published by Vitalik Buterin in 2013. Fundraising for the project's development was conducted in 2014 by the independent non-profit Ethereum Foundation through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). This effectively became an analog of an IPO for crypto projects and one of the first cases of coin distribution based on this principle. In total, the developers managed to raise nearly 31.6 thousand bitcoins back then — about $18 million at the exchange rate of the time.
The co-founders of the project included Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson (founder of Cardano), Mihai Alisie (founder of Bitcoin Magazine), Anthony Di Iorio (founder of Decentral), Amir Chetrit, Gavin Wood (founder of Polkadot), Jeffrey Wilcke (founder of Grit Games), and Joseph Lubin (founder of Consensys, MetaMask, and head of SharpLink).
According to the ICO terms, the initial price of "ether" was set at 2000 $ETH for 1 $BTC and was to remain so for 14 days before linearly decreasing to a final rate of 1337 $ETH for 1 $BTC. That is, relative to $BTC, one ether coin cost from 0.0005 to 0.00074 $BTC. In dollar terms, it is commonly accepted that one $ETH was sold for $0.31.
As of July 30, the $ETH rate is at the $1.92 thousand mark, indicating growth of almost 6.2 thousand times. Relative to Bitcoin, $ETH is trading at 0.0297, representing growth of almost 60 times from the ICO price.
Interestingly, not all ICO participants sold their Ethereum coins from that time. Those who invested a few hundred dollars back then and managed to preserve the coins have essentially become dollar millionaires. And periodically, such players transfer assets to other addresses or exchange wallets, like the owner of 10 thousand $ETH in early April.
Ethereum's Plans
Meanwhile, the price trend over the last five years cannot be called positive for Ethereum. For example, at the peak of the bull market in 2021, the price of one coin approached $5 thousand for the first time. If we look at this time period, the losses from the peak in November 2021 to the end of July 2026 amounted to about 60%. There was an attempt to approach $5 thousand per $ETH in August 2025 as well; however, it was also unsuccessful, and the absolute record was about $4.96 thousand.
The relatively weak price trend of "ether" coincided with a stagnation in protocol governance that lasted since Ethereum's transition to staking mechanisms in 2022 — before that, the blockchain worked on mining, as it does in Bitcoin. Also, as experts note, Ethereum has many fundamental problems: this concerns funding for new developments, as well as the "inefficient" economic model of Ethereum, which may put pressure on the asset's price.
Against the backdrop of this uncertainty, since 2026 the community of $ETH developers has become active in practically all development directions, and Buterin called the changes a full-scale system overhaul, comparable to ether's transition to staking algorithms.
The areas of interest for the developers of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap include building artificial intelligence infrastructure, network privacy mechanisms, as well as a focus on scaling and even protecting the blockchain from quantum computers. Additionally, independent organizations have begun to form around the project, aiming to increase interest from institutional investors in the asset.
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