March 14, 2016, or “Pi Day,” as Jeff Wilcke announced in a blog post. That’s when they launched Ethereum’s first production-ready version, called Homestead. The upgrade fixed some flaws found in the previous versions, and would make the network faster and more reliable. It meant that Ethereum was no longer in test mode and was finally ready for serious companies to build on.6 The network had grown considerably by the Homestead launch. It had about 5,100 nodes, compared with Bitcoin’s about 6,000, and was processing about 25,000 transactions a day, or about 10 percent of transactions in the
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