The cofounders of Ethereum – who are they and where are they now?

What happened to the cofounders of Ethereum, the world’s second-largest blockchain, this week?

Only one of the eight co-founders is still working on Ethereum today-their grand experiment for a new financial revolution. “They all had huge egos, some more than others,” said Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine, the company’s first published history. This explains why the eight aren’t in Ethereum anymore. Their personalities are too large to share.”
However, the majority of them are still in the crypto space. While some names are familiar, some are not. Here’s what they’ve accomplished five years after beginning their breathtaking venture.

The Cofounders of Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum was conceived by 19-year-old, Russian-Canadian, computer science geek and Bitcoin Magazine writer Vitalik Buterin in November 2013. Buterin’s whitepaper, written after three years spent exploring the emerging crypto sector, was his response to the limitations of Bitcoin, and proposed a platform enabling any decentralized, censorship-resistant application imaginable.

He’s tried to take a backseat in recent years, to focus on Ethereum 2.0—the next phase of the blockchain platform’s development, which will enable it to scale. Controversially, he’s determined that rollout will begin as early as the end of the year.
He is the only one of the Ethereum co-founders still directly working on the platform.

Mihai Alisie

Previously, Mihai Alisie worked with Vitalik Buterin at Bitcoin Magazine.

Mihai Alisie, a graduate in cybernetics, made a living coaching and playing poker in Romania when he heard about Bitcoin. When he met Buterin in 2011, they decided to launch Bitcoin Magazine, and then to launch Egora, a decentralized eBay for Bitcoin.
Until late 2015, he was vice-president of the Ethereum Foundation. He then turned his attention to Akasha, a social framework for Ethereum.
Alisie is not as involved in Ethereum as he used to be, but his social network experiment is starting to take shape, and it could even launch in time for Ethereum 2.0.

Anthony Di Iorio

Toronto-born Anthony Di Iorio hails from the same city as Buterin. In addition to family money, he dabbled in marketing and venture investing £1 million in a geothermal drill business before becoming interested in Bitcoin.

Di Iorio was chief digital officer of the Toronto Stock Exchange after Ethereum, but he left to found Decentral – the company that developed Jaxx, a digital wallet that launched in May 2018. In the same year.
Since stepping down as CEO of Decentral in September 2019, Russo has shifted his focus to the health and wellness industry.

Amir Chetrit

In September 2013, Buterin met Amir Chetrit, a US-Israeli national, at a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam. After dropping out of his computer science degree, he dabbled in real estate in the years before 2008, when he began to doubt the conventional finance system as did nearly all the other founders.
During the time he met Buterin, he was working with Israeli startup Colored Coins, a project to manage real-world assets as tokens on top of the Bitcoin network. Chetrit also worked on the project before Buterin came up with Ethereum; in December 2013, he invited him to join him.

When Ethereum developers and other co-founders criticized Chetrit’s lack of involvement in Ethereum during the co-founders’ meeting in June 2014, he agreed to step down while remaining a cofounder.
Despite supporting various blockchain projects, Russo keeps a low profile and does not like publicity.

Charles Hoskinson

Mathematician Charles Hoskinson became disillusioned with his profession and began to be interested in Bitcoin. Hoskinson grew up in Hawaii and Colorado, and had already raised money for a decentralized exchange when he was introduced to Ethereum by Anthony Di Iorio.

As a result of Ethereum’s controversial 2016 hard fork, Hoskinson supported Ethereum Classic, creating a rival blockchain. Since the rollout of a major new blockchain upgrade earlier this month, Cardano has become the sixth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Cardano is going to be the real Ethereum killer, according to him. And that’s what brings decentralized applications,” said Russo.