Ethereum finalized block 25,000,000 on May 1, 2026, marking nearly 11 years of operation since the network’s genesis block on July 30, 2015.
Important points:
- Ethereum completed 25 million blocks on May 1, 2026, approximately 11 years after its creation in July 2015, without any long-term global network outages.
- This milestone reflects Ethereum’s 10 years of operation through major upgrades, including the transition from merging to proof of stake in 2022, despite some historic issues.
- Bitcoin is tracking towards 1,000,000 blocks, with approximately 52,509 blocks remaining upon estimated arrival in mid-2027.
Validators surpass 25 million blocks on Ethereum, Bitcoin approaches 1 million blocks
Although this milestone does not involve any protocol-level changes, it has caught the attention of the Ethereum community as a measure of network durability. Since Block Zero, Ethereum’s base layer has never suffered an extended global outage, and while the chain is not without incidents, this is a record that sets it apart from some other large networks.
In 2023, Ethereum halted block finalization twice within 24 hours, with each interruption lasting over an hour. Earlier incidents in 2016 and 2020 caused infrastructure issues and partial disruptions. A bug in the Prysm client once took about 23% of the nodes offline, but the chain continued to produce blocks. But for most of its life, Ethereum has been trucking.
This distinction is important. The base layer has never experienced a complete global outage for long periods of time, but throughout its history it has experienced performance degradation, client failures, and finalization gaps.
In proof-of-stake (PoS), which Ethereum adopted with the September 2022 merge, the network targets one block every 12 seconds. In proof-of-work (PoW) before the merge, the average block time was 13-15 seconds. At this pace, it has been producing around 7,000 blocks per day in recent months, with each block bundling transactions, gas usage data, base fees, and validator rewards into a cryptographically linked record.
Each block proposed in PoS passes through a slot of approximately 12 seconds and reaches finality after 2 epochs. This process takes approximately 15 minutes. Block 25,000,000 followed the same path and was finalized by validator consensus without any central authority intervention.
The network’s blockchain size currently reaches hundreds of gigabytes, with tens of millions of ETH locked in staking. Layer 2 (L2) solutions continue to make up a growing proportion of Ethereum’s transaction volume, but some L2 networks built on top of Ethereum have experienced apparent outages. The development roadmap includes plans for single-slot finality, compressing the current 15-minute finalization window into one 12-second slot.
Ethereum has had several major protocol upgrades over its history, including EIP-1559 and London, which introduced base price burning. Staking withdrawals are now available in Shanghai. Dencun added transactions that carry BLOBs to support L2 data availability. Each upgrade passed through the network while blocks continued to be generated.
At the current production rate, Etherscan and Beacon Chain explorers were already showing blocks in the range of 25,000,395 immediately after the milestone blocks were confirmed.
Bitcoin’s path to 1 million blocks
Meanwhile, Bitcoin is tracking its own round number milestone. As of May 1, 2026, the Bitcoin blockchain sits at approximately 947,491 blocks, with approximately 52,509 blocks remaining until block 1,000,000.
Bitcoin executes on average about 144 blocks per day, about 1 block every 10 minutes, but sometimes it executes slightly faster, averaging about 9 minutes per block, and sometimes slower than the 10-minute trajectory. At this pace, the network will reach 1,000,000 blocks in mid-to-late 2027, approximately 364 days.
Block 1,000,000 has no significance as a Bitcoin protocol. This will not trigger any halvings, upgrades, or changes to the consensus rules. Half-lives occur every 210,000 block intervals. In the next block, the block reward will be reduced to 1.5625 BTC, but block 1,050,000 is scheduled and is scheduled in about 2 years.
Bitcoin’s Genesis block was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009. The network has maintained a strong uptime record over that period, similar to the resilience Ethereum has demonstrated throughout its block history. According to Bitcoin statistics, the uptime has been around 99.99026572226% since its launch.
Both milestones reflect how decentralized networks accumulate history block by block without a central operator deciding when or if to continue.
