<div id="readability-page-1">Golden anniversary shield with a laurel wreath celebrating ten years. getty  On July 30, 2025, Ethereum celebrated 10 years since its launch, marking a new milestone in crypto history. With a decade-long record of uninterrupted uptime, it has laid the foundations for DeFi and an era of open public digital networks that serve all of society.  In the past decade, Ethereum has traversed uncharted territory, from a unique fundraising strategy called the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in 2014, raising $18.3 million, to hosting Blackrock’s first public onchain money market fund last year - you’ve come a long way baby.  Regulatory clarity in the American economy now plays a big role in Ethereum’s future. Since the SEC’s massive crackdown on ICOs in 2018, accusing them of violating securities laws, the agency has itself come a long way in the past few months in under a new chair.  Recently, SEC chair, Paul Atkins, gave a speech on “American Leadership in the Digital Finance Revolution”. In the speech, he highlighted Trump’s Executive Order to make America the “crypto capital of the world” and that the “DNA of the DeFi movement embodies American ideals like economic liberty, private property rights, and innovation.”  Atkins explicitly stated that the right to self-custody digital assets is a &#34;core American value,&#34; emphasizing the importance of individuals having control over their own property, and announced the kick off of Project Crypto aimed at modernizing SEC custody rules to accommodate crypto assets, including exploring exemptive relief and potential rule changes to allow market participants to operate efficiently.  MORE FOR YOU  The SEC is considering an &#34;innovation exemption&#34; to protect DeFi projects from overly restrictive regulations, allowing them to operate within a more flexible framework. Atkins defended developers of self-custody wallets and DeFi applications, stating that they shouldn't be held liable for how users utilize their software, comparing it to holding car manufacturers responsible for traffic accidents.  He also highlighted the resilience of self-executing, on-chain systems, particularly in contrast to centralized platforms and stressed the need for regulatory clarity regarding core crypto activities like staking and mining, stating that they should not be automatically classified as securities.  The SEC issued a clarification this week that properly structured liquid‑staking protocols and their receipt tokens generally do not constitute securities under U.S. law.  Happy 10th Birthday Ethereum, the SEC has honored you by giving the DeFi ecosystem the best gift ever – regulatory clarity that supports DeFi as the future for financial services, and you are the DeFi market leader - a worthy award for the groundbreaking innovation you have brought us.  On this momentous occasion, let’s look back at how Ethereum built the underlying architecture for dapps as it is positioned to play a central role in daily interactions and enterprise systems in the financial services sector in decade to come.  Ethereum draws its strength from a strong developer community that emphasizes strengthening the network’s infrastructure. Trevor Koverko, co-Founder of Polymath and Sapien, commented, “For a decade, Ethereum has paved the way for tech founders to tinker with their ideas and build something meaningful.  Take the example of the ERC-20 token standard. It transformed the idea of token launches and brought uniformity in value transfers without worrying about liquidity fragmentation across different blockchains.  The 2017-18 ICO boom did lead to the growth of scam tokens, but that’s negligible collateral damage. Scammers gave serious projects the incentives and confidence to build something that delivered real value on a secure and decentralized network like Ethereum.  Ever since, builders have doubled down on token standards, with the introduction of ERC-721 for NFTs, ERC-1155 to combine fungible and non-fungible attributes, ERC-1400 for compliant security tokens, and many others.  Ethereum has, however, had its share of dark days. In 2016, the Ethereum DAO suffered a $60 million exploit, leading to a permanent split of the blockchain. The new chain after the hard fork reversed the network to the moment before the theft and continued as Ethereum, while the older one is now called Ethereum Classic.  As Qi Wu, co-Founder of PLVR, explained, “From the DAO fork to hundreds of exploits, Ethereum paid the price early. But those lessons created the best developer tooling, auditing practices, and frameworks in the space. Today, building on Ethereum is safer, smarter, and more robust than ever.”  Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Ethereum - It took its time to gain the confidence of its well-knit community of developers and users to build a robust network.  Elaborating on Ethereum’s trust-building exercise, Alexander Cutler, co-founder of Aerodrome, a DEX on Base, said, “Entering a trustless global system, ironically, requires trustworthiness. And Ethereum has earned it over the past 10 years by consistently leading the way with uncompromising infrastructure built to last the next 100 years.”  No one thought Ethereum would become such a time-tested and reliable backbone of onchain interactions. Isidoros Passadis, head of staking and core contributor at Lido, noted, “Ten years ago, Ethereum was just a bold experiment. Today, it supports billions in economic activity and is reshaping finance, governance, and coordination worldwide.”  Echoing that sentiment, Michael Huynh, co-founder of DCentral Conference, said, “Ethereum is no longer an experiment. It’s now a pillar of the crypto industry. From an idea ten years ago to a thriving ecosystem with thousands of companies innovating the future of tech — it has transcended the speculative norms to redefine technologies that were once just mere theories.”  With the end of the first decade, the age of experimentation at Ethereum is over. The next decade is about iteration and doubling down on its strengths to lead research and development in the digital assets space.  Billy Luedtke, ceo and founder of Intuition, remarked, “After ten years of head-down engineering, Ethereum’s infrastructure has quietly crossed a threshold: it’s now sturdy enough for mainnet, mission-critical workloads.  Advancements such as rollups, data availability layers, account abstraction, and staking — ideas that were truly no more mature than prototypes a few years ago — have hardened into audited production systems. We can finally retire the “test in prod” meme and start migrating the world’s first financial system onto the credibly neutral rails of Ethereum.  Crucially, the network effects that matter most — security, developer mindshare, and tooling — have only deepened. Competing chains still sell “faster and cheaper”, yet Ethereum’s roadmap (verkle trees, danksharding, recursive L3s) points to near-infinite scalability without sacrificing decentralization.”  As Ethereum matures and sets a target for the next decade, its strength lies in advancing crypto’s core strength of decentralized internet - Web3 - architecture.  There’s a reason why Ether (ETH) is the OG altcoin, next only to bitcoin, in terms of market cap and popularity.  Wu explains, “Ethereum is still the most used chain because it’s where developers go first, where trust is highest, liquidity deepest, and infrastructure most mature. L1 remains the secure backbone, while L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base deliver scalability.  This layered design, shaped by a community committed to credible neutrality and decentralization, attracts the best builders and drives Ethereum’s continued leadership in developer activity, app composability, and settlement value.”  It is Ethereum’s commitment to the blockchain’s primary principles that makes it a winner.  Cutler says, “Ethereum hasn’t sacrificed the security or neutrality of its infrastructure, even though it had immense pressures to do so in exchange for greater adoption, profits, and market share. This is why, as the world comes onchain, Ethereum is the only credible infrastructure that has the track record and consistent practices to support its adoption at scale.”  On a similar vein, Passadis adds, “As Ethereum moves into its second decade, more institutions and individuals are seeing the value of its decentralization and neutrality. This growing interest gives us a genuine opportunity to reinforce these core principles actively. By thoughtfully welcoming new participants, we can make sure Ethereum stays resilient, inclusive, and truly open to everyone.  Ethereum’s strength has always come from collective participation. If we carefully align future growth with the values that got us here, the next decade will firmly establish Ethereum as the trusted and neutral foundation for the global economy.”  The institutional demand is evident from the market data. ETH ETFs have recorded massive monthly inflows of $5.4 billion in July, as Ethereum celebrated its 10th anniversary. Since June, crypto treasury firms have also acquired more than 1% of ETH’s circulating supply, outpacing Bitcoin treasury funds.  Luedtke explained, “The market has noticed. Institutions like BlackRock have turned ETH from a “venture bet” into an allocation-worthy treasury asset, giving institutions a compliance-ready onramp to staking yield and onchain participation.  Meanwhile, Robinhood has begun issuing tokenized U.S. equities on an Ethereum-based L2, offering its European users 24/7 trading and instant settlement — an early glimpse of Wall Street’s operating system in the cloud. For the first time, the buy-side is dragging the sell-side (and the regulators) towards on-chain infrastructure rather than waiting for banks to lead.”  Huyn observed, “Ethereum’s future is still untold. As newer companies from every sector build on the blockchain and start experimenting, the more we’ll see newer tools emerging. RWAs, decentralized treasuries, stocks, ETFs, loans, NFTs, games, AI — all these sectors are beginning to emerge, and I believe they would multiply demand drastically.”  Luedtke says, “We’re still only in inning one. An infinite roadmap — including stateless clients, unified liquidity across rollups, and richer data-and-identity layers — remains on deck for the infinite garden of Ethereum.  Ethereum’s real promise is bigger than finance: it is an open, programmable trust layer for society — exactly the kind of substrate we’ll need to prevent AI-era power structures from ossifying behind black box algorithms and closed APIs, ensuring through code that no one person or group has too much power.”  The next decade of Ethereum’s journey will be about further developing the plumbing – the backend infrastructure - and solving real problems with innovative onchain products, without compromising on decentralization and security.  It sounds rather boring, but it is this steady hand on the tiller and commitment to quality scaling and network growth that is the backbone of the digital Financial Market Infrastructure (dFMI) game, and is the not-so-secret sauce that wins support from developers and financial institutions alike.  And let’s not forget the SEC’s role in accelerating the growth and adoption of DeFi into the next decade. Here’s to the next 10 years of Ethereum – the OG that started the DeFi movement – may the force be with you.</div>

ETHE

<p>Ethereum celebrated its 10th anniversary on July 30, 2025, marking a significant milestone in the crypto world. The SEC, under Chair Paul Atkins, has provided regulatory clarity for the DeFi ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of self-custody of digital assets and proposing an 'innovation exemption' for DeFi projects. This clarity supports Ethereum's role as a leader in decentralized finance, highlighting its contributions to the development of dapps and token standards. Despite past challenges, Ethereum has built a strong foundation for future growth in financial services.</p>

Ethereum Is 10 Years Old As The SEC Chair Heralds DeFi As The Future