Timeline
15 moments that made blockchain validation what it is. Each one is a publication, a first or a decision that can be looked up.
- 1982Lamport, Shostak and Pease publish “The Byzantine Generals Problem”.
- 1985Fischer, Lynch and Paterson prove that deterministic consensus is impossible in a fully asynchronous network with even one faulty process.
- 1988Dwork, Lynch and Stockmeyer introduce the partial-synchrony model.
- 1999Castro and Liskov publish Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Micali, Rabin and Vadhan publish verifiable random functions.
- 2001Boneh, Lynn and Shacham publish the signature scheme later used to combine thousands of validator votes into one.
- 2008The Bitcoin paper introduces proof of work as the way to agree in an open network.
- 2011Proof of stake is proposed on a public forum as an alternative to proof of work.
- 2012Peercoin launches: the first implementation of proof of stake, in hybrid form.
- 2014Slashing is proposed. Tendermint combines Byzantine agreement with stake. Delegated proof of stake appears.
- 2017Ouroboros, Casper FFG and Algorand are published.
- 2019The first large network built on Tendermint consensus launches.
- 2020Ethereum’s proof-of-stake chain starts on 1 December, running alongside the existing proof-of-work chain.
- 2022On 15 September Ethereum switches from proof of work to proof of stake; its estimated electricity use falls by more than 99 per cent.
- 2023Withdrawals of staked ether are enabled.
- 2025An Ethereum upgrade raises the maximum effective balance of one validator from 32 to 2,048 ether.