Ethereum officially turned 10 on Wednesday, marking a decade since its mainnet launch on July 30, 2015. Although its native token, Ether (ETH), has struggled to maintain momentum over the past five years, experts say its long-term outlook is improving.

Originally proposed in a 2013 white paper by programmer Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum introduced the concept of smart contracts, or self-executing code deployed on decentralized networks. The blockchain also paved the way for decentralized applications (dApps) and helped enable the emergence of decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Currently, Ethereum is the world’s largest blockchain by total value locked (TVL) in DeFi, holding nearly $84 billion of DeFi’s $140 billion TVL, per DeFiLlama. In terms of valuation, ETH is only second to Bitcoin (BTC) – with ETH currently trading at around $3,800 with a market cap of $459 billion, compared to Bitcoin’s $2.3 trillion, according to CoinGecko.

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