Vitalik Buterin and the Rise and Fall of the Eight Ethereum Co-Founders

On June 7, 2014, in a rented house called “Spaceship” in Switzerland, Vitalik Buterin and seven other co-founders witnessed the birth of the Ethereum concept. Today, Ethereum’s market capitalization has surpassed $200 billion, and this smart contract platform has spawned a series of blockchain innovations such as ICOs, NFTs, and DeFi. However, the original eight-person founding team has now largely split apart—only Vitalik Buterin remains steadfast in this ideal.

The Clash Between Ideals and Reality

Initial disagreements seemed simple but were enough to destroy the cohesion of a founding team. The issue was not technical but a fundamental ideological dispute: Should Ethereum become a profit-driven commercial company, or should it remain a purely non-profit organization?

In December 2013, Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit first confirmed their collaboration. Just a few months later, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke joined. Amid this seemingly thriving expansion, underlying conflicts were already brewing.

Charles Hoskinson, as an early CEO, had straightforward ideas—this should be a business. Hailing from Hawaii, Hoskinson was a math enthusiast who was attracted by Bitcoin’s appeal. When tasked with establishing the Swiss foundation and legal framework, he laid a solid administrative foundation for Ethereum. However, when Vitalik Buterin firmly chose a non-profit model, their opposition became irreconcilable. Rumors circulated about Hoskinson’s departure—he claimed to have resigned voluntarily, while others hinted he was pushed out. The fact is, their fundamental differences in goals doomed their split.

The reasons for Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin’s departures were similar—they came from wealthy backgrounds and initially participated in Ethereum to generate more wealth. When Ethereum rejected the path of commercialization, they also chose to withdraw. Di Iorio later engaged in real estate and crypto investments, founding the digital wallet Jaxx. By 2021, he had accumulated over $750 million in net assets and ultimately chose to step back, citing security concerns.

Diverging Technologies and the Building of New Empires

Compared to commercial ambitions, Gavin Wood’s departure stemmed from deeper philosophical disagreements over technology. As Ethereum’s first CTO, this British programmer, with exceptional engineering skills, completed the first working version of Ethereum (PoC 1) and authored the famous “Ethereum Yellow Paper,” officially defining the EVM virtual machine.

But Gavin Wood’s ambitions went far beyond that. In 2014, he proposed the concept of Web3—a decentralized, autonomous network environment designed to break the monopolies of the existing internet. In his view, “less trust, more facts” was the core of Web3. However, he gradually discovered ideological differences with Vitalik Buterin regarding governance—such as the use of hard forks, ETH as the sole medium for transaction fees, etc.—which conflicted with his understanding of “true decentralization.”

At the end of 2015, Gavin Wood left Ethereum, founded EthCore, and rewrote the Ethereum client Parity in Rust. After gathering over 60 developers from 15 countries, Parity’s performance far surpassed Geth and C++ clients. Yet, Gavin’s real masterpiece is Polkadot—a multi-chain ecosystem dubbed the “Ethereum killer.” Today, Polkadot has become a strong competitor to Ethereum.

Charles Hoskinson also embarked on an entrepreneurial path. After being forced out of Ethereum, he supported Ethereum Classic (ETC) during the 2016 DAO incident, and later founded Cardano. Compared to Ethereum, Cardano claims to be a “scientifically driven” third-generation blockchain, adopting a more conservative development strategy. The ADA token surged in 2021, making Hoskinson a billionaire.

The Steadfast Builders of the Ecosystem

Unlike Hoskinson and Gavin Wood’s rebellious paths, Joseph Lubin chose participation over opposition. With a Princeton engineering degree and ample funding, Lubin did not leave Ethereum but instead founded ConsenSys—a development company built on Ethereum. By incubating well-known projects like MetaMask and Infura, ConsenSys became one of the most important builders of the Ethereum ecosystem. This approach satisfied both commercial interests and supported Ethereum’s growth.

Mihai Alisie and Amir Chetrit’s departures were even more silent. Alisie founded Akasha, aiming to build a social network framework based on Ethereum and IPFS. Chetrit, after participating in the Colored Coins project, gradually faded from the public eye. Jeffrey Wilcke, after contributing to the Geth client, eventually handed the project over to others due to the Hard Fork incident and personal life changes, focusing instead on his game development studio Grid Games.

Vitalik Buterin’s Solitary Perseverance

Amid this talent exodus, only Vitalik Buterin has remained unwavering. This genius, affectionately called “V God” by the Chinese community, has experienced extraordinary events.

His legendary story as a young prodigy is well known—he won a bronze medal at the 2012 International Olympiad in Informatics, and later became interested in Bitcoin through playing World of Warcraft. When a Blizzard system upgrade weakened his character, he suddenly realized the horror of centralized services—data and rights all controlled by others. This epiphany changed his life trajectory.

Realizing Bitcoin’s limitations, Vitalik decided to create a platform supporting application development and resisting censorship. His white paper was met with coldness in the Bitcoin community, but that did not discourage him. In 2014, he and these seven like-minded individuals officially launched Ethereum in Miami.

Today, with a market cap exceeding $200 billion, Vitalik Buterin still maintains his early frugal lifestyle—sloppy clothes, quirky socks, and all his belongings in a backpack. But this outward neglect cannot hide his core status as the spiritual leader of Ethereum.

Lessons from the Split

In an interview, Vitalik Buterin openly expressed regret: “Apart from technical issues, the biggest regret in Ethereum’s development was the hasty choice of the eight founders and the subsequent team split.”

He further reflected: “Coordinating a small group is far more complex than I imagined. You can’t just have people sit in a circle, gazing into each other’s kindness. Meanwhile, there are huge motivational conflicts.” This reveals the fundamental difficulty of team collaboration—an eternal conflict between idealism and practical interests.

Because of this split, Vitalik Buterin learned to be more cautious in choosing collaborators. He realized that shared values are often more important than similar skills. In later Ethereum governance, he drew lessons from this experience, establishing more decentralized decision-making mechanisms to prevent power from concentrating in a few hands.

A New Life for the Ecosystem

Despite the fragmentation of the founding team, Ethereum’s ecosystem continues to thrive. Those who left have each achieved success—Cardano and Polkadot are strong competitors, and ConsenSys supports countless application innovations. In a sense, these splits are not failures but rather a diffusion and deepening of the entire crypto ecosystem.

Vitalik Buterin remains at the core of Ethereum, pushing forward the transition from PoW to PoS (the Merge upgrade), achieving a long-anticipated technological revolution. Meanwhile, those former co-founders, though on different paths, are all shaping the future of Web3 in their own ways.

From this perspective, the division and reunion of the eight founders is essentially a process of ecosystem differentiation and adaptation. Vitalik Buterin’s solitary perseverance is not the persistence of a failure but the loyalty of an idealist to his original vision. The departure of others is merely a search for their own path of innovation. As V God himself said, what matters is not whether people are together, but whether they can work towards the same goal—even if that goal appears completely different in each person’s eyes.