Today, July 30, marks nine years since the main network of Ethereum (ETH) was launched. Many enthusiasts celebrate this day as the birthday of one of the biggest blockchains.

Nine years later, Ethereum is the biggest altcoin on the market and second biggest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. As things stand, market capitalization of ETH, the network's native currency, totals $401 million. The total value locked in the blockchain nears $60 billion. 

Thus, on this exact day in 2015, the former COO of the Ethereum Foundation, Stephan Tual, shared a post on a blog making the network rollout official. In his post, Tual wrote about a vision of a world computer, which will be programmable and censorship-proof.

Today, however, it was Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, who shared his post. Thus, Buterin congratulated Ethereum on its 9th birthday and said that he is looking forward to seeing what the next decade brings.

What's next for Ethereum (ETH)?

Ethereum continues its development in full accordance with its roadmap. After a series of upgrades and proposal implementations, the blockchain is on track for the next milestones. 

Next up are the Verge and Purge upgrades. The first is going to bring in Verkle trees, which will let us run stateless clients and cut the cost of running a node. This change is expected to allow for a tenfold increase in the layer-1 gas limit, which will make transactions cheaper.

The aim is to make the Ethereum Virtual Machine simpler by removing certain features. This will make the EVM more efficient.