What Happened to the 8 Founders of Ethereum’s Collapse?

On June 7, 2014, witnessed by eight co-founders, the concept of Ethereum was born in a rental house called "Spaceship" in the Swiss woods. Today, the highest market value can exceed 150 billion US dollars. In fact, since the birth of Ethereum, the encryption industry has caused a storm, and even set off waves of enthusiasm in the web3 world, such as 1CO, NFT, Defi, IDO and other concepts. Even the concept of Web3 comes from a co-founder of Ethereum.

Ethereum is the center of this storm. It is a consensus on decentralization established by a group of idealists, but it also has many storms inside. Originally, the list of Ethereum founders was very long. According to one of its founders, Anthony Di Iorio, in December 2013, there were five founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie and Amir Chetrit. Then in 2014, another three joined as co-founders: Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

Later, the eight people fell apart, and only Vitalik is still working for Ethereum. The main reason for the rift between the eight people was a fierce argument about whether Ethereum should become a for-profit company or remain non-profit. So although Ethereum had 8 co-founders at the beginning, in the process of the Ethereum community growing, these irreconcilable non-consensus parts made Ethereum and Vitalik sacrifice the division of community thinking and the departure of team members every step forward.

Today, apart from Vitalik Buterin, the names of several other people may not be well known, and this is what Plain Language Blockchain wants to share today.

Those who became competitors

1) Community Contender Charles Hoskinson

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Charles Hoskinson is one of the original five founders of Ethereum. Born in Hawaii, he originally wanted to be a mathematician, but found that the charm of Bitcoin was more interesting than mathematics, so he began to devote himself to the blockchain industry.

In December 2013, Hoskinson was appointed CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and was responsible for the Swiss Foundation and its legal framework. In the early days of Ethereum, as CEO, he laid a solid foundation for the development of Ethereum, especially in the establishment and development of the Foundation and the establishment of the legal framework and other basic work.

However, his time on the project ended within a few months, partly due to his reportedly rift with the other founders. Hoskinson wanted Ethereum to be a for-profit company, but Vitalik wanted it to be a non-profit platform. There are rumors about his departure: he said he left on his own initiative, but others said Vitalik fired him. Either way, it is known that the two did not particularly like each other and occasionally took jabs at each other's methods.

The DAO incident in 2016 caused Ethereum to fork, and Charles happened to use this incident to support Ethereum Classic (ETC). Later, he left to found Cardano. (ADA (Cardano) is the token of the project. Cardano is a new generation of blockchain smart contract platform under development, committed to becoming a more convenient, faster and smarter new generation of underlying public chain , and is known as the first blockchain project "driven by scientific philosophy and research".

The difference between Cardano and Ethereum is that Cardano research precedes practice and development is more conservative, but it may be more easily accepted by traditional industries. Its ada cryptocurrency soared in 2021. Cardano also allows users to build their own projects. Currently, there are many community participants and it is now a strong competitor to Ethereum.

2) Public chain competitor Gavin Wood

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One of Gavin Wood's most praised abilities is his strong engineering ability, that is, the ability to turn ideas into code through reasonable architecture design and programming. In the minds of many blockchain developers, he is a god-level programmer and technical leader.

In 2013, Gavin, who had developed some interest in blockchain, met Vitalik Buterin through an old friend. After listening to Vitalik Buterin's ideas about Ethereum, Gavin thought the idea of ​​making blockchain programmable was very interesting and decided to help Vitalik Buterin write Ethereum into code. In 2014, he went to Miami and founded Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin and several other founders. Here, Gavin developed the first operational version of Ethereum, generally referred to as Ethereum PoC 1 or Alpha version. After that, Gavin served as the first CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Ethereum. In 2014, he wrote the "Ethereum Yellow Paper", which defined the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is the first formal technical specification of the blockchain state machine.

In the next two years, Gavin devoted himself to the development of Ethereum, including building a general platform architecture, completing most of the development work of the Ethereum C++ client, and designing Solidity, an object-oriented programming language for writing Ethereum smart contracts.

The concept of Web3 was proposed by Gavin Wood in 2014, which is to establish a decentralized and free network environment to break the monopoly of the current Internet and return data and privacy to users. He also hopes to use blockchain technology to eliminate the exploitation of users by major platforms, use more truth to ensure that everything goes as expected, and allow the entire society to no longer rely on human trust to operate. He summarized the core concept of Web3 as: "Less trust, more truth."
At the end of 2015, Gavin left Ethereum and founded EthCore. Gavin is an ambitious person who likes challenges. After gradually gathering more than 60 developers from 15 countries, he proposed to write the Ethereum Parity client in Rust. EthCore developed into Parity Technology, with performance far exceeding Geth and C++ clients. He said this is exactly what we want to learn and focus on.

This is the blockchain protocol Polkadot, a chain that is believed to have the ability to grow into a brand new one to replace Ethereum. Today, Polkadot has indeed become a strong competitor to Ethereum.

The reason why Gavin left Ethereum is unknown. Some speculate that Gavin and Vitalik may have had differences in the development path of Ethereum. In some later interviews, Gavin did mention that he did not agree with Ethereum's governance through hard forks, and he believed that only being able to use ETH to pay for fees made Ethereum deviate from its original intention of becoming a "freely competitive DEX." It seems that in Gavin's mind, Ethereum cannot realize his vision of Web3.0.

Those who became partners

1) Joseph Lubin, who is rich and powerful

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Joseph Lubin is the most experienced of the 8 founders of Ethereum. Lubin, who is from the UK, graduated from Princeton University in 1987 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. After graduation, Lubin has worked in a diverse career in software engineering, music production, business and finance. Later, Lubin became interested in cryptocurrency and got in touch with fellow Canadian Di Iorio through the Canadian Bitcoin Alliance.

In 2014, he met Vitalik Buterin. After reading Vitalik Buterin's white paper, he was quite impressed. So when he was invited to join the co-founder team, he gladly went. At that time, he was responsible for and proposed to write the architecture of Ethereum in C++ programming language, so he was mainly responsible for the technical part. In addition, his family was financially strong, and together with Di Iorio, he provided a lot of financial support for the initial development of Ethereum.

Later, when Ethereum chose to become a non-profit organization, Joseph left the Ethereum community due to different development visions, and Lubin founded the for-profit Ethereum development company ConsenSys, which launched many different projects on the network. One example is the well-known little fox wallet MetaMask. Because Joseph wanted to achieve commercial success, Consensys no longer focused only on Ethereum open source development, but focused more on building applications and incubating a large number of blockchain startups. Mainly based on the Ethereum platform, but also based on other platforms, such as Filecoin or Polkadot.

Currently, Consensys has become an incubator for other blockchain startups, and also maintains partnerships with many traditional companies, such as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, BP, Intel, and Microsoft.

2) Mihai Alisie, a believer in Bitcoin

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Alisie is from Romania and graduated in 2010 from the Lucien Blaga University in Sibiu, where he majored in Cybernetics, Economic Informatics and Statistics.

At first, Vitalik Buterin wrote articles on forums and blogs to study Bitcoin. Bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie happened to see them, so the two began to actively contact each other and eventually co-founded Bitcoin Magazine at the end of 2011. At that time, Vitalik Buterin was the chief writer and Alisie was the editor-in-chief.

Later, when Vitalik created Ethereum, Alisie responded positively. He helped establish Ethereum's base in Switzerland, merged the initial startups, and led Switzerland to create the business infrastructure and legal framework that was critical to Ethereum's crowdfunding activities, such as opening a bank account for Ethereum, a fledgling crypto company (it is said that this was a difficult thing at the time), dealing with lawyers and Swiss officials on the legal framework that was critical to the pre-sale activities, etc.

“In the early days, this was a group of people with big ideas and big ambitions, and it wasn’t clear that they would be successful,” Alisie said.

In the early days of Ethereum, he also assisted in the formulation of Ethereum's strategic planning and served as the vice chairman of the Ethereum Foundation. Until the end of 2015, after discussing whether Ethereum needed to be profitable, he began to retreat and gradually devoted himself to Ethereum's social framework Akasha because it did not meet expectations. Akasha uses Ethereum and IPFS to build applications, and Alisie's social framework also hopes to achieve greater development with the help of Ethereum 2.0 and Filecoin.

Those who left the circle

1) Anthony Di Iorio, who has retired

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Anthony Di Iorio, like Vitalik Buterin, is also from Toronto. He has a wide range of business interests and has been involved in marketing and venture capital. He is also the executive director of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada and has organized the first Bitcoin Summit in Toronto. In November 2012, he met Vitalik Buterin at a Bitcoin meetup.

He has one thing in common with the founder Joseph Lubin mentioned above, that is, he is also a second-generation rich man with a strong family background , mainly because he has a rich father. At the end of 2013, he participated in the funding and co-founded Ethereum. There is no detailed information about the specific project he was responsible for. However, he said that the reason for participating in Ethereum was simple, to make more money.

The reason for his retreat is similar to Joseph's. He does not support Ethereum's non-profit operation. After Ethereum established a non-profit operating model, Di Iorio gradually withdrew and left soon after. After leaving, Di Iorio briefly served as the chief digital officer of the Toronto Stock Exchange. But the advantage of having money is freedom, and you can freely choose what you want to do. He thought that it would be better to do something big with assets in hand. So he left in 2016 and created Decentral to develop the Jaxx digital wallet. The wallet was first launched in May 2018. In the same year, Di Iorio was selected as one of the top 20 richest people in cryptocurrency by Forbes magazine, with an estimated net worth of US$750 million to US$1 billion at the time.

But in the summer of 2021, Anthony Di Iorio announced that he would withdraw from the Bitcoin circle for personal safety reasons and planned to sell his blockchain company Decentral Inc for "hundreds of millions of dollars." Anthony Di Iorio did not disclose the amount of cryptocurrency he holds, and said that he would sever ties with other startups he participated in and would no longer fund any blockchain projects. He plans to devote himself to charity and other fields in the future.

2) Amir Chetrit, Investmentist

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This is a professional from Israel who majored in computer science. However, his first pot of gold in his career came from real estate development. He dropped out of school in 2008 and then got involved in real estate. At that time, he began to doubt the traditional financial system due to the financial crisis. Later, he began to get involved in Bitcoin, which he felt was a good opportunity to make more money.

Amir Chetrit met Vitalik Buterin at a Bitcoin event in Amsterdam in September 2013.

When he met Vitalik, he was working with the Israeli startup Colored Coins, which aims to manage real-world assets as tokens on top of the Bitcoin network. Vitalik had also been involved in the project before he proposed Ethereum. In December 2013, Chetrit was invited by Vitalik to join the creation of Ethereum.

After all, he was in real estate and investment, so he might not be passionate enough about technology and Ethereum’s vision, and there was no detailed introduction of his specific responsibilities. At the co-founder meeting in June 2014, Chetrit was criticized by Ethereum developers and other co-founders for his lack of commitment to Ethereum, and chose to resign. He later devoted himself to other industries.

3) Jeffrey Wilcke, who stays at home to be a dad

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Another computer programmer, Jeffrey Wilcke, was working on the first ICO Mastercoin in the Netherlands when he came into contact with Ethereum and became very interested in it, so he decided to quietly write an implementation page in Google's Go language. In early 2014, he joined the list of founders together with Gavin Wood.

Wilcke's software page building journey is also called Go Ethereum, or "Geth" for short. He can be regarded as an important programmer in the early development of Ethereum. When Gavin Wood used C++ to implement Ethereum, Jeffrey also implemented Ethereum using golang. This pioneered the development of blockchain.

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However, after the Ethereum hard fork, a series of hacking incidents, and the birth of his son, Wilcke handed over the supervision of Geth to his right-hand man Peter Szilagyi. Currently, he runs a game development studio Grid Games with his brother Joey. It was previously reported that he had sold some ETH to fund Grid Games to recruit developers.

Vitalik Buterin never forgets his original intention

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Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, is called "V God" by Chinese fans. Basically, anyone who can be called a "god" has a legend.

First of all, there is Vitalik’s image as a child prodigy. He is a gifted boy who was very good at mathematics and programming when he was a child. When he was a freshman in college, he won the bronze medal in the 2012 International Olympiad in Informatics.

But there is a sense of contrast between his glorious image and his personality and appearance. V God is thin and small, like an "elf", and walks a little stiffly, but he runs fast. Once he participated in an Ethereum community event, he ran away after leaving the venue, and his fans didn't catch up with him. Moreover, he is introverted and has no interest in dressing himself up. He wears simple and comfortable clothes. When he speaks, he occasionally chokes at the corners of his mouth. Most of the time, he likes to immerse himself in his own world. Many legends come from this: V God is an autistic child prodigy, V God once wore two Hello Kitty socks with different patterns on the train, V God packed all his property in a suitcase, and V God eats lemons without peeling. But according to relevant reports, V God's father denied it. However, people in the Ethereum community are very keen to "add bricks and tiles" to V God's mysterious image. Is this the so-called don't be obsessed with me, I am just a legend?

What inspired him to explore Bitcoin and the emerging crypto industry was the games he played. He started playing World of Warcraft at the age of 13 (2007) and became a die-hard fan. In 2010, due to Blizzard's system upgrade, Vitalik was forced to make some adjustments to the character attributes in the game. He couldn't accept it and gave up playing World of Warcraft. Then he realized the horror of centralized services.

At that time, Vitalik began to regard government regulation and corporate centralized control as a kind of original sin. Naturally, Bitcoin's decentralization and the fact that it is not controlled by any individual or organization aroused his strong interest. So when he heard about Bitcoin, his eyes lit up. Later, he searched for a job that could be paid in Bitcoin on various forums. By chance, there was an opportunity for him to write articles and earn Bitcoin.

The idea of ​​Ethereum was originally born from Vitalik Buterin's desire to improve Bitcoin. As a columnist at the time, after conducting a lot of research, he discovered some limitations of Bitcoin and began to try to make suggestions in the community, but at that time he was still a nobody and the bigwigs in the Bitcoin community did not pay much attention to his ideas.

Vitalik Buterin is good at explaining things, so he wrote a white paper based on the concept behind BTC, proposing to build a new platform where any decentralized and censorship-resistant application can exist. Thus, a blockchain platform with a wider range of uses and compatible with more applications - the "World Computer" was born.

Vitalik started using computers at a very young age | Image source: BAZAAR

When the total market value of Ethereum exceeded 500 billion US dollars, Vitalik Buterin once admitted that he did not expect Ethereum to become such a behemoth and that things would become so complicated. "When I created Ethereum, I just wanted to complete it within a few months and then go back to college."

However, whether in terms of personal brand image or professional technology, Vitalik has made great contributions to the development of Ethereum. In recent years, he has gradually retreated to the second line and focused on Ethereum 2.0. He is also the only co-founder still engaged in Ethereum-related work.

summary

Indeed, of Ethereum’s eight co-founders, only Vitalik Buterin is still around, whether it’s Charles Hoskinson and Gavin Wood, who have become competitors; Anthony Di Iorio, Amir Chetrit, and Jeffrey Wilcke, who have exited the industry to pursue other careers; or Mihai Alisie and Joseph Lubin, who have founded companies to help build Ethereum’s application and community layers.

Vitalik once said that the biggest regret (non-technical) in the Ethereum journey was the hasty selection of the "8 co-founders" and the separation of everyone. It is easy to bring the big gods together, but Vitalik said that making them think in the same way is the most difficult lesson in the development of Ethereum.