Nothing about the launch felt ceremonial. On 30 July 2015, minutes after the first block was mined, Ethereum was running under the codename Frontier and warning its own users that they were stepping onto unstable ground, suitable only for people who understood what they were doing and could afford to lose money. No press release, no stage, no audience. Block zero can still be pulled up in any public explorer, a birth certificate written straight into code.
Eleven years on, the picture looks nothing like that. The network sits above 230 billion dollars in market capitalisation and remains the second largest in crypto after Bitcoin. Ether trades around 1,880 dollars, roughly 36 percent below where it started the year. Most of the world’s stablecoins move across the protocol, along with the bulk of decentralised finance and an entire floor of layer 2 solutions.
Something else changed, and it does not show up on any chart. Of the eight cofounders, exactly one still works on the protocol.
Eight Biographies With Almost Nothing in Common
The founding document surfaced at the end of 2013, written by a nineteen year old from Toronto who was contributing to a niche publication. Vitalik Buterin was proposing something easy to state and hard to swallow at the time. Instead of a network built for a single purpose, moving value, there could be one capable of executing any program with the same guarantees of immutability. A computer maintained by thousands of machines that have no particular reason to trust one another.
The project went public in January 2014 at the Bitcoin conference in Miami. Five people were around the table then, and three more joined over the following months. Two came out of specialist media, Buterin and the Romanian Mihai Alisie. Two brought capital and commercial instinct, the Canadian Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin.
The heavy engineering fell to the British developer Gavin Wood, a man obsessed with rigorous specifications, and to the Dutch programmer Jeffrey Wilcke. The last two, Charles Hoskinson and Amir Chetrit, arrived from entirely different worlds, a mathematician with an appetite for corporate structure and a veteran of the Colored Coins experiment.
The full account of where each of them ended up was pieced together by Cryptology.ro, the Romanian language crypto news and analysis outlet, in a report signed by journalist Mihai Popa.
The Day in June 2014 When the Team Split in Two
The tension broke inside a rented house in Zug, Switzerland, which its occupants had nicknamed the spaceship. One question was on the table, whether Ethereum would become a commercial company backed by venture investors or a nonprofit foundation. Buterin chose the second option and, the same day, told Hoskinson and Chetrit they were out of the project. Journalist Laura Shin later called it the Game of Thrones day, and the label stuck.
What followed was the public token sale of summer 2014, which brought in more than 31,000 bitcoin, somewhere near 18 million dollars at the exchange rate of the day.
Vitalik Buterin, the Only One Left Inside the Protocol
Buterin still writes specifications, still publishes essays that mix game theory with political philosophy, and still turns up at conferences in a manner that remains, a decade later, entirely free of theatrics. His continued involvement with the Ethereum Foundation also makes him the lightning rod for every complaint in the market, and traders regularly accuse the organisation of doing too little for the price of the asset.
The answer came in the form of a painful restructuring, with roughly 54 positions cut, about a fifth of the staff, alongside a target of reducing the budget by 40 percent.
Lean Ethereum and the Technical Plan for the Coming Years
The roadmap published in July is compared by its own author, in terms of scale, to the 2022 move to proof of stake. Its first theme is privacy, treated as a property of the protocol rather than a feature bolted on by third party applications. After the sanctioning of Tornado Cash in 2022, transactions arriving from anonymity protocols began to be quietly passed over by block builders, and the plan promises them native inclusion guarantees.
Next comes resistance to quantum computers, through the gradual replacement of the cryptographic schemes the network relies on today, together with a verification model built on recursive STARK proofs, where a single node does the heavy computation and everyone else checks a compact proof. The foundation has a complicated history with deadlines, though this particular document names concrete schemes and measurable targets rather than aspirations.
What the Other Seven Did Next
Charles Hoskinson, From Expulsion to Cardano
Few people have converted a firing into such durable public capital. After Zug, Hoskinson built precisely what he had been denied there, a solid company and a blockchain designed as an answer to what he considered Ethereum’s flaws. Cardano launched in 2017 with an emphasis on academic research and on chain governance, although this year’s market comparison does him no favours, since ADA has lost close to 55 percent since 1 January.
He then bet heavily on Midnight, a partner network focused on selective privacy, subsidised out of his own pocket to the tune of roughly 200 million dollars. Meanwhile a treasury funding request of almost 33 million ADA ran into serious resistance from the delegates who vote. The governance works exactly as designed, only not in the founder’s favour.
Joseph Lubin and the Infrastructure Around the Network
The most entrepreneurial of the cofounders set up ConsenSys immediately after launch, a company that never built a competing blockchain and instead built everything people needed in order to use Ethereum. The MetaMask wallet and the Infura infrastructure came out of the same house.
The past two years have carried Lubin into traditional markets as chairman of SharpLink, a listed company holding roughly 873,000 ether, all of it staked. His argument is that ether behaves as a form of productive money rather than an asset that simply sits on a balance sheet.
Gavin Wood and the Second World Computer
Wood turned the original vision into a specification developers could actually implement. The Yellow Paper, written by him, defines the Ethereum virtual machine in precise terms and remains one of the industry’s foundational texts. He is also credited with popularising the word web3. He left early, founded Parity Technologies, moved on to Polkadot, and is now assembling a second world computer through a project called JAM.
Alisie, Di Iorio, Wilcke and Chetrit, Four Ways of Disappearing
For readers in Romania, the presence of Mihai Alisie on the founders’ list remains the least known detail of the whole story. He founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2012, the publication Buterin was writing for, and worked on the legal structuring of the project in Switzerland at a moment when nobody knew how to register a foundation for a network with no owner. Then came AKASHA, an attempt at a social network with no central server, whose foundation has since announced its closure.
Anthony Di Iorio remains the only one who openly said he wanted to leave the industry, citing personal safety concerns back in 2021, and the company he founded afterwards has been silent across every channel since 2022. Jeffrey Wilcke, author of the Geth client, runs a small game studio with his brother that almost nobody hears about. Amir Chetrit chose anonymity, and in a business where visibility is currency, his silence reads as a decision rather than an accident.
Market figures and the themes that shape cryptocurrency value are tracked daily by the Cryptology.ro team, where analyst Mihai Popa covers DeFi, on chain attacks and European regulation for Romanian readers.
What the Founders’ Dispersal Says About a 230 Billion Dollar Network
Their departure can be read as weakness. The opposite reading sits closer to reality. A protocol that depends on the presence of its creators is not decentralised, no matter how many nodes it runs. Bitcoin benefited from the complete disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto, which removed the question of who is in charge before anyone could ask it.
Ethereum arrived at the same place by a longer route, through the DAO attack of 2016, through the initial coin offering bubble of 2017 and through the switch to proof of stake. Not one of those moments depended on a single person.
One question survives eleven years without an answer. The world computer was imagined as a place where applications run without intermediaries. What emerged is a financial layer carrying hundreds of billions of dollars in stablecoins, tokenised assets and corporate treasuries. The utility is real and measurable. So is the distance from the original intention.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ethereum’s Founders
How many cofounders does Ethereum have?
Eight are officially recognised. Five were present at the public announcement in January 2014, and the remaining three joined before the token sale later that year.
When was the Ethereum genesis block mined?
On 30 July 2015. The release was named Frontier and was aimed explicitly at developers, with blunt warnings about the risks of using it.
Which founder still works on the protocol?
Vitalik Buterin is the only one contributing directly to protocol development, and he remains involved with the Ethereum Foundation. The other seven left at different stages, from 2014 onwards.
Why did Charles Hoskinson leave Ethereum?
He argued for turning the project into a venture backed company, while Buterin wanted a nonprofit foundation. The disagreement ended in June 2014, when Hoskinson and Amir Chetrit were removed from the team. Three years later he launched Cardano.
Who is the Romanian in Ethereum’s founding team?
Mihai Alisie, cofounder of Bitcoin Magazine in 2012 and closely involved in the legal structuring of the project in Switzerland. He later led AKASHA, a decentralised social platform built on Ethereum.
What does Lean Ethereum mean?
It is the roadmap Vitalik Buterin published in July 2026 for the next three or four years. It proposes privacy built into the protocol, the replacement of cryptographic schemes exposed to quantum computers, and a verification model in which the network checks a compact proof instead of re executing every transaction.
How much did Ethereum raise before launch?
More than 31,000 bitcoin, worth roughly 18 million dollars in the summer of 2014. That money funded development until the network went live on 30 July 2015.
