Blockchain platform Ethereum has undergone a series of transformations since its inception.

The platform kicked off with the initial vision of creating a "decentralized world computer." Yet it swiftly ran into challenges involving scalability and its impact on the environment.

Here's how it progressed over time and what is expected to take place going ahead.

Historical Ethereum upgrades

One of the earliest Ethereum upgrades was the Byzantium hard fork in October 2017. This reduced rewards for mining Ethereum blocks from 5 ETH per block to 3 ETH. It also delayed the difficulty bomb for another year, a planned change to move the network away from its proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

In 2019, there were the Instanbul and Constantinople upgrades. Instanbul helped to optimize …