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Ethereum's development

The development of Ethereum was planned to be done in four different stages, with major changes in each one:

Frontier
Homestead
Metropolis
Serenity

It was used to deliver and research innovative solutions as they were required, with a hard fork for functionality that is not backward compatible. In 2015, Frontier was launched as the first version of Ethereum. A year later, Homestead was launched, which included many improvements and made Ethereum a capable system with enough power to process smart contracts.

One of the biggest ICOs conducted on top of Ethereum was the decentralized autonomous organization ICO, also known as the DAO, which raised $150 million dollars with contributions from more than 11,000 people. The problem is that it got hacked by an unknown group of individuals that moved the funds to a different DAO. Interestingly enough, a group of programmers known as the White Hat Group saw the hack happening and extracted as many funds as possible into a separate decentralized organization known as the White Hat DAO, where they stored people's money to distribute them later.

This event originated a heated debate in the community that caused Ethereum to be divided in two groups, where some believed in the fact that Ethereum must be immutable and shouldn't be modified, while others believed in a hard fork to revert the damage done.

That was the beginning of Ethereum Classic and Ethereum as we know it. Ethereum Classic has a noticeable smaller user base, but it preserves the initial immutability ideals that they consider essential for a blockchain. In March 2017, several companies joined efforts to create the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA), which is currently a non-profit organization made of more than 500 members whose goal is as follows:

"To create open-source, standards-based blockchain specifications."

-Ethereum Enterprise Alliance

In other words, they created a group of people collaborating on solutions for future blockchains to come, so that they are better, faster, and more capable.

It suffered from several hacks, where millions of dollars were stolen. They had to do a hard fork to save people's funds and have a notorious price volatility, but the future looks bright and it continues, improve as demand increases.