Charles Hoskinson Talks About His Time At ETH

The co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson has spoken about how Ethereum came to fruition and what his role was in the project, whilst being interviewed with Mpho Dadaga. Hoskinson said that if the minds behind the crypto had predicted that Ethereum was going to be the biggest digital currency in the market, then the team would have thought things about a lot more. Hoskinson said:

“So, we got Vitalik… his presentation was really swarmed. Like a rock star… he kind of had second tier speaking slot and he goes on and they only gave him 25 minutes. He says, let me introduce Ethereum.”

He goes onto say:

“He put this thing on the slide, shows you how you can do master coin and 20 lines of code and then 13 lines of code or something like that. And then Vitalik says, any questions? Everybody in the room raises their hands. And I felt so bad for the speaker that had to follow them because they had only time for like three minutes of questions. So when Vitalik left, everybody just left the room and speaker comes up there and the room is empty.”

This led to the creation of two groups within the Ethereum team, one being the technical group and the other being the business group. In the technical group, Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin were members and the business group had Anthony Di Lorio and Joseph Lubin. Hoskinson managed both of the groups. Hoskinson said that at the beginning there was originally two options on how to build the project. One was to create a non profit business and issue a crowdfund, they would then use the funds to build the protocol. This was called crypto-Mozilla. The other option was called crypto-Google and was based on what Ripple did through making a profitable company, funding type hierarchy, venture capital and being very focused similar to a Silicon Valley startup. According to Hoskinson, the business group of Ethereum preferred the crypto-Google option which the technical group argued since they believed it would compromise the whole integrity of the project. Following many discussions and disputes, Hoskinson left the team after some time including some members who decided to go on their own path. Hoskinson says that it was right decision to make at the time.