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Ethereum Frontier (2015): The Launch of a World Computer

The July 30, 2015 Frontier release brought the Turing-complete EVM and programmable smart contracts to mainnet.

The crowdsale

Vitalik Buterin published the Ethereum whitepaper in late 2013. In July and August 2014 the Ethereum Foundation sold about 60 million ether for roughly 31,500 BTC, worth around $18 million at the time, at an initial rate of 2,000 ETH per BTC.

Frontier goes live

The Frontier network launched on July 30, 2015, at block 0 with a genesis allocation of about 72 million ETH. Frontier was explicitly a command-line beta with a gas limit initially fixed at 5,000 gas per block so that miners could set up before transactions were enabled several days later.

The EVM and gas

Every operation in the Ethereum Virtual Machine costs a fixed amount of gas: 3 for ADD, 20,000 for writing a new storage slot, and 21,000 for a simple transfer. A fee is gas used times gas price, so a transfer at 50 gwei cost 0.00105 ETH. This metering makes Turing-complete code safe to run on thousands of nodes.

Homestead and early contracts

The Homestead fork at block 1,150,000 on March 14, 2016, removed the beta label. Early contracts included name registries, multisig wallets and the first token experiments that later became the ERC-20 standard, proposed by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015.

Why Frontier mattered

Bitcoin's script language was intentionally limited. Frontier showed a general-purpose state machine could be secured by proof of work, opening the path to DeFi, NFTs and rollups that still settle on the same chain that began on July 30, 2015.

By the numbers

For Ethereum Frontier, the reference figures are launch date of July 30, 2015, genesis supply of ~72 million ETH, 2014 crowdsale of ~31,500 BTC raised, initial gas limit of 5,000. The comparison table below lines up opcode/action, gas cost — ADD: 3; SLOAD (cold, post-Berlin): 2,100; SSTORE new slot: 20,000; Plain ETH transfer: 21,000; Contract creation base: 32,000.

Modeling Ethereum Frontier with the Ethereum EIP1559 Gwei To USD Calculator

The Ethereum EIP1559 Gwei To USD Calculator takes three inputs — Gas used, Base+tip (gwei), ETH price ($). Fee = gas × gwei × 1e-9 × ETH price. With its default inputs (Gas used = 21000; Base+tip (gwei) = 20; ETH price ($) = 3000) it returns 1.26 $; swap in the figures from Ethereum Frontier above to reproduce the scenario yourself.

Modeling Ethereum Frontier with the Smart Contract Deployment Gas Estimator

The Smart Contract Deployment Gas Estimator takes three inputs — Bytecode (bytes), Gas price (gwei), ETH price ($). Gas ≈ 32,000 + 200 × bytes. With its default inputs (Bytecode (bytes) = 12000; Gas price (gwei) = 20; ETH price ($) = 3000) it returns 145.92 $; swap in the figures from Ethereum Frontier above to reproduce the scenario yourself.

Data Table

For educational and informational purposes only. Not financial, investment, tax or legal advice. Figures are approximate and historical; crypto assets are volatile and you may lose capital. Do your own research.