Ethereum (ETH) Live Price and charts Today

• In September, Bellatrix upgrade. The Bellatrix upgrade was the second scheduled upgrade for the Beacon Chain, preparing the chain for The Merge. It brings validator penalties to their full values for inactivity and slashable offenses. Bellatrix also includes an update to the fork choice rules to prepare the chain for The Merge and the transition from the last proof-of-work block to the first proof-of-stake block. This includes making consensus clients aware of the terminal total difficulty of 58750000000000000000000.
• The Merge. Ethereum was finally transformed from PoW to Pos. The Merge was also known as the Paris upgrade. The Paris upgrade was triggered by the proof-of-work blockchain passing a terminal total difficulty of 58750000000000000000000. This happened at block 15537393 on 15th September 2022, triggering the Paris upgrade the next block. Paris was The Merge transition - its major feature was switching off the proof-of-work mining algorithm and associated consensus logic and switching on proof-of-stake instead. Paris itself was an upgrade to the execution clients (equivalent to Bellatrix on the consensus layer) that enabled them to take instruction from their connected consensus clients. This required a new set of internal API methods, collectively known as the Engine API, to be activated. This was arguably the most significant upgrade in Ethereum history since Homestead!

• Gray Glacier upgrade. The Gray Glacier network upgrade pushed back the difficulty bomb by three months. This is the only change introduced in this upgrade, and is similar in nature to the Arrow Glacier and Muir Glacier upgrades. Similar changes have been performed on the Byzantium, Constantinople and London network upgrades.

• London fork, the EIP 1559 was introduced, which reformed the transaction fee market, along with changes to how gas refunds are handled and the Ice Age schedule.
• In October, The Altair upgrade was the first scheduled upgrade for the Beacon Chain. It added support for "sync committees"—enabling light clients, and increased validator inactivity and slashing penalties as development progressed towards The Merge.
• In December, The Arrow Glacier network upgrade pushed back the difficulty bomb by several months. This is the only change introduced in this upgrade, and is similar in nature to the Muir Glacier upgrade. Similar changes have been performed on the Byzantium, Constantinople and London network upgrads.

• In October, Staking deposit contract was deployed.
• In December, Beacon Chain genesis, The Beacon Chain needed 16384 deposits of 32 staked ETH to ship securely. This happened on November 27, meaning the Beacon Chain started producing blocks on December 1, 2020. This is an important first step in achieving the Ethereum vision.

• Istanbul upgrade (fork)
  • Optimised the gas cost of certain actions in the EVM.
  • Improved denial-of-service attack resilience.
  • Made Layer 2 scaling solutions based on SNARKs and STARKs more performant.
  • Enabled Ethereum and Zcash to interoperate.
  • Allowed contracts to introduce more creative functions.
• Constantinople
  • Ensured the blockchain didn't freeze before proof-of-stake was implemented.
  • Optimised the gas cost of certain actions in the EVM.
  • Added the ability to interact with addresses that haven't been created yet.

• Ethereum's native token, Ether or ETH, grew more than 13,000% in 2017. 
• The Byzantium fork was performed
  • Reduced block mining rewards from 5 to 3 ETH.
  • Delayed the difficulty bomb by a year.
  • Added ability to make non-state-changing calls to other contracts.
  • Added certain cryptography methods to allow for layer 2 scaling.

• The DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization raised $150 million in a crowd sale.
• The DAO was hacked in a month later.
• Ethereum performed a hard fork to reappropriates the affected funds and resulted in splitting Ethereum into two chains, Ethereum Classic (the original chain) and Ethereum (the one we are using now).

Ethereum was officially launched and the ‘genesis block’ was created. This was call ‘Frontier’ launch. The genesis block contained more than 8000 transactions and allocated various amounts of ETH to different addresses.

• Ethereum was announced in the Bitcoin Conference in Miami. Gavin Wood (founder of Polkadot), Charles Hopkinson (founder of Cardano), and Anthony Di Lori later rented a house in Miami along with Buterin to develop Ethereum.
• The idea of putting Smart contracts in blockchain was finished by Gavin Wood, who was the CTO of Ethereum at that time.
• Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit foundation in Swiss was founded.
• In August 2014, an online public crowd sale was held to raise fund to develop Ethereum.

• Ethereum white paper was published by Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin was a former programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine.