The Theta Network was co-founded by Mitch Liu, a computer scientist from MIT who did his MBA at Stanford, and Jieyi Long, an engineer from Peking University with a Ph.D. from Northwestern. They set up Theta Labs as the company that went on to develop both the Theta token and the blockchain. The initiative was first announced in November 2017 via Medium. A THETA token sale followed this during its initial coin offering (ICO) in January 2018, when the token was initially designed as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. The Theta Network mainnet 1.0 launch happened in March 2019, followed by the mainnet 2.0 launch in May 2020. The second mainnet launch brought the concept of community-run Guardian nodes to validate transactions. The Theta mainnet 3.0 launched in July 2021, bringing smart contract capabilities to its blockchain infrastructure. In 2022, Theta Labs announced the Theta Metachain concept with more scalability, throughput, and security.