The DAO event

In 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization called The DAO, a set of smart contracts

developed on the platform, raised a record US$150 million in a crowdsale to fund the project.[34] The
DAO was exploited in June 2016 when US$50 million of DAO tokens were stolen by an unknown
hacker.[35][36] The event sparked a debate in the crypto-community about whether Ethereum should
perform a contentious "hard fork" to reappropriate the affected funds. [37] It resulted in the network
splitting into two blockchains: Ethereum with the theft reversed and Ethereum Classic which
continued on the original chain.[38] The hard fork created a rivalry between the two networks. After the
hard fork, Ethereum subsequently forked twice in the fourth quarter of 2016 to deal with other
attacks.

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Corporate Adoption

In March 2017, various blockchain startups, research groups, and Fortune 500 companies
announced the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) with 30 founding members. [39] By
May 2017, the nonprofit organization had 116 enterprise members – including ConsenSys, CME
Group, Cornell University's research group, Toyota Research Institute, Samsung
SDS, Microsoft, Intel, J. P. Morgan, Cooley LLP, Merck KGaA, DTCC, Deloitte, Accenture, Banco
Santander, BNY Mellon, ING, and National Bank of Canada.[40][41] By July 2017, there were over 150
members in the alliance, including MasterCard, Cisco Systems, Sberbank, and Scotiabank.[42][43]
In March 2021, Visa Inc. announced that it began settling stablecoin transactions using Ethereum.
[44]
 In April 2021, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, and MasterCard announced that they were investing $65
million into ConsenSys, a software development firm that builds Ethereum-related infrastructure. [45]

Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 releases

Code name Release Release

date block

ETH 2.0 Phase 0 (Beacon 2020-12-01 0

Chain)

ETH 2.0 Phase 1 (planned) TBD TBD

ETH 2.0 Phase 2 (planned) TBD TBD

Open-source development is currently underway for a major upgrade to Ethereum known as

Ethereum 2.0 or Eth2.[46] The main purpose of the upgrade is to increase transaction throughput for
the network from the current of about 15 transactions per second to up to tens of thousands of
transactions per second.[47]
The stated goal is to increase throughput by splitting up the workload into many blockchains
running in parallel (referred to as sharding) and then having them all share a
common consensus proof-of-stake blockchain, so that to maliciously tamper with any singular chain
would require one to tamper with the common consensus, which would cost the attacker far more
than they could ever gain from an attack.
Ethereum 2.0 (also known as Serenity) is designed to be launched in three phases:

1. "Phase 0" was launched on 1 December 2020 and created the Beacon Chain,
a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that will act as the central coordination and
consensus hub of Ethereum 2.0.[48][3][49]
2. "Phase 1" will create shard chains and connect them to the Beacon Chain.
3. "Phase 2" will implement state execution in the shard chains [17] with the current
Ethereum 1.0 chain expected to become one of the shards of Ethereum 2.0.