Today, Ethereum blockchain is responsible for the majority of the dApps available to us. The proliferation of new technology on Ethereum means that regular software updates, known as forks, are necessary to ensure the smooth rollout of upgrades. 

We examine all the forks on the Ethereum blockchain since its creation in 2015. 

1. Frontier
July 30, 2015
Launch of Ethereum

 2. Frontier Thawing
September 08, 2015
First Ethereum fork, although unplanned. It allowed developers to stress test the network while maintaining the original protocols on a separate chain

3. Homestead
March 15, 2016
Homestead was the first planned Ethereum hard fork. This fork included a major update that allowed users to transact ether (ETH) and create/deploy smart contracts.

4. The DAO
July 20, 2016
In June 2016, hackers stole US$50 million in ether (ETH) from The DAO, sparking a contentious debate within the community whether Ethereum should hard-fork to recover the stolen funds. This resulted in the most divisive fork to date, branching the original blockchain into Ethereum Classic and the new Ethereum.

5. Tangerine Whistle
October 18. 2016
The Tangerine Whistle fork was the first response to the denial of service (DoS) attacks on the network.

6. Spurious Dragon
November 22, 2016
The Spurious Dragon fork was the second response to the denial of service (DoS) attacks on the network including tuning opcode pricing to prevent future attacks on the network, enabling “debloat” of the blockchain state and, adding replay attack protection.

7. Byzantium
October 16, 2017
The Byzantium fork reduced block mining rewards from 5 to 3 ETH. It also delayed the difficulty bomb by a year and added ability to make non-state-changing calls to other contracts. At last it added certain cryptography methods to allow for layer 2 scaling.

8. Constantinople 
February 28, 2019
The Constantinople fork ensured the blockchain didn’t freeze before proof-of-stake was implemented, optimized the gas cost of certain actions in the EVM and added the ability to interact with addresses that haven’t been created yet.

9. Istanbul
December 8, 2019
The Istanbul fork optimized the gas cost of certain actions in the EVM, improved denial-of-service attack resilience, made Layer 2 scaling solutions based on SNARKs and STARKs more performant. It also enabled Ethereum and Zcash to interoperate and allowed contracts to introduce more creative functions.

10. Muir Glacier
January 2, 2020
The Muir Glacier fork introduced a delay to the difficulty bomb. Increases in block difficulty of the proof-of-work consensus mechanism threatened to degrade the usability of Ethereum by increasing wait times for sending transactions and using dapps.

11. Staking deposit contract deployed
October 14, 2022
The staking deposit contract introduced staking to the Ethereum ecosystem. Although a Mainnet contract, it had a direct impact on the timeline for launching the Beacon Chain, an important Ethereum upgrade.

12. Beacon Chain Genesis
December 01, 2020
The Beacon Chain needed 16384 deposits of 32 staked ETH to ship securely. This happened on November 27, meaning the Beacon Chain started producing blocks on December 1, 2020. This is an important first step in achieving the Ethereum vision.

13. Berlin
April 15, 2021
The Berlin upgrade optimized gas cost for certain EVM actions, and increased support for multiple transaction types.

14. London
August 05, 2021
The London upgrade introduced EIP-1559, which reformed the transaction fee market, along with changes to how gas refunds are handled and the Ice Age schedule.

15. Altair
October 27, 2021
The Altair upgrade was the first scheduled upgrade for the Beacon Chain. It added support for “sync committees”—enabling light clients, and bringing validator inactivity and slashing penalties up to their full values.

16. Arrow Glacier
December 09, 2021
The Arrow Glacier network upgrade pushed back the difficulty bomb by several months. This is the only change introduced in this upgrade, and is similar in nature to the Muir Glacier upgrade. Similar changes have been performed on the Byzantium, Constantinople and London network upgrades.

17. Gray Glacier
June 30, 2022
The Gray Glacier network upgrade pushed back the difficulty bomb by three months. This is the only change introduced in this upgrade, and is similar in nature to the Arrow Glacier and Muir Glacier upgrades. Similar changes have been performed on the Byzantium, Constantinople and London network upgrades.

18. The Merge
September 06, 2022 (Planned)
The Merge represents the joining of the existing execution layer of Ethereum (the Mainnet we use today) with its new proof-of-stake consensus layer, the Beacon Chain. 

Source: Ethereum.org 

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