History of Ethereum

• Launched in 2016
• Hard fork after a major DAO, TheDAO got hacked
  • Split into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, followed by purists
• Move from PoW towards PoS based Ethereum 2.0 in 2020-21
  • Introduction of Beacon chains / the Merge
  • Move to Shard chains / Sharding
    • Consists of the surge, the verge, the purge and the splurge
    • Surge - Split of the blockchain into into 64 Shard chains
    • Verge - Replacing hexary Patricia Trees with Verkle trees (like Merkle trees) for scaling
    • Purge - Purging of outdated transactions
    • Splurge - Smaller updates and fine tuning