Before the genesis block, the whitepaper

Ethereum’s 10-year anniversary is coming up, and in the lead-up to the celebration, we want to look back at some key milestones in its history. This is the first of three posts we’ll be sharing over the next few days, revisiting foundational moments in this very special journey that brought us to where we are today.

On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum genesis block was mined. But before diving into what the genesis block was, how it came to be, and its implications, we want to go a bit further back—about a year earlier, or maybe a little more. Let's explore the origins of the Ethereum whitepaper.

A whitepaper is, simply put, a document that outlines the key aspects of a project. In the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, Bitcoin's whitepaper was released in 2008.

In late 2013, a young and incredibly talented programmer and writer passionate about Bitcoin—Russian-born, raised in Canada—sent an email to 13 people with the subject line: "Introducing Ethereum: a generalized smart contract/DAC platform." Yes, we’re talking about Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum.

In that email, he introduced a draft of the Ethereum whitepaper with the following words:

“Hey all, I would like to introduce the first draft of a whitepaper for a project that I have been working on quietly these last two weeks. The project is called Ethereum (…) If anyone wishes to join the project, feel free to send me an email expressing your interest. Regards, Vitalik.”

We chose to keep this excerpt in its original language because, at least for us, it feels more impactful that way. It invites us to imagine being one of those 13 people who received this message—just as you read it now (though the full version was longer)—and learned about a technology that would go on to transform so many aspects of the internet and the world.

In the following months, Vitalik worked intensely with his team: three co-founders (Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson), and a group of over 15 developers, including today’s well-known figures in the Ethereum and broader blockchain ecosystem like Joseph Lubin and Gavin Wood.

That technical core was joined by a strong marketing and communications team. Through meetups, AMAs on Reddit, and blog posts, the project that would become Ethereum was continuously refined and shared with the world.

The public presentation of the whitepaper took place on January 26, 2014, at BTC Miami—one of the most important Bitcoin conferences at the time. Ethereum did not yet exist as a network or organization, and Vitalik was mainly known for his articles in Bitcoin Magazine. In front of an audience focused on Bitcoin, Vitalik presented a much broader idea: a general-purpose platform for running contracts and decentralized applications on a blockchain.

Over the following months, the official and final version of the whitepaper was published and shared through ethereum.org.

But beyond the historical narrative, we think it’s important to revisit the conceptual elements outlined in this foundational document.

The first section of the whitepaper offers a historical overview. It mentions cryptography and digital money predecessors, then focuses on Bitcoin, analyzing both its groundbreaking innovations and its limitations. It also discusses early alternative applications built on Bitcoin, such as Namecoin, Colored Coins, and Metacoins.

Next comes the section that specifically introduces Ethereum. At this point, we think it's worth quoting the translated text directly:

“The purpose of Ethereum is to create an alternative protocol for building decentralized applications, providing a different set of tradeoffs that we believe will be very useful for a large class of decentralized applications, with particular emphasis on situations where rapid development time, security for small and rarely used applications, and the ability of different applications to interact very efficiently are important. Ethereum does this by building what is essentially the ultimate abstract foundational layer: a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language, allowing anyone to write smart contracts and decentralized applications where they can create their own arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats, and state transition functions.”

The paper then goes on to explain fundamental protocol concepts: messages, transactions, nonces, how blocks and mining work, and more.

What follows is perhaps the most fascinating part: the potential applications of Ethereum. It’s striking how much foresight Vitalik and the founding team had—even before the chain’s launch—about the vast potential across multiple sectors, many of which have since evolved into thriving and fast-growing industries.

The potential applications are categorized into three broad groups:

1. Financial applications: enabling new ways to manage money, create financial contracts, derivatives, savings wallets, digital wills, or even automated labor contracts.

2. Semi-financial applications: involving money, but not solely focused on economics. For example, automatic rewards for solving computational problems.

3. Non-financial applications: such as electronic voting, decentralized governance systems, or digital identity.

From this vision, Ethereum was proposed as an infrastructure for building decentralized tools across many areas. Among the use cases Vitalik anticipated in the whitepaper are:

• Smart contracts
• Decentralized applications (dApps)
• Identity and reputation systems
• Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)
• Decentralized storage
• Prediction markets
• Decentralized marketplaces
• Financial applications, including stablecoins, crop insurance, multisig escrow contracts, and derivatives—early precedents of what would later become the DeFi ecosystem.

He also clearly described how Ethereum would allow the creation of token systems on the blockchain, representing anything from dollars or shares to reputation points or digital ownership—programmed as a simple database that follows contract-defined rules.

This is just a brief summary of the whitepaper. We’ll stop here, because honestly, who better to explain it all than Vitalik himself, just as he did for the very first time in public…

Here is the video from BTC Miami 2014, where @VitalikButerin introduced the Ethereum whitepaper publicly for the first time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9dpjN3Mwps

If you’d like to read it yourself, you can access the official or “canonical” version dated December 2014 here: https://ethereum.org/content/whitepaper/whitepaper-pdf/EthereumWhitepaper-Buterin2014.pdf

If you enjoyed reading these details from Ethereum’s past, imagine how it will feel in 10 years when you're part of the history we're building right now.

This is the first of three posts looking back at Ethereum’s history. In the coming days, we’ll dive into the ICO and the Genesis Block.

Let’s keep connecting Ethereum’s present with its future.