Who Are The Core Devs of Ethereum? (Part II)

adamgdev

As a team that has built a working product on Ethereum, Ethex.market wanted to give a shout out to some of the core devs building out this revolutionary technology. Below are 15 Core Devs that have been integral in moving Ethereum forward. They have all contributed to Ethereum directly or by working on projects that are working closely with Ethereum. We were unable to find information on the core devs in one place, so we thought it would be worthwhile to do some research and organize the information. If we missed any crucial information or need to change something, please leave a comment below and we will make the appropriate changes. If you know of any additional core devs we forgot to include, please let us know in the comment section below. Also, be sure to click here to check out Part I of our Core Dev series, which features 13 of Ethereum’s top developers.


Alexey Akhunov
Focus Area: Ethereum 1.x (addressing problems with the large and growing state, designing gas-efficient stateless contracts, implementing chain pruning, etc.)

Projects: Turbo-Geth (a version of Geth which features a number of speed and performance optimizations)

Education: Bachelor of Science, PhD, Computer Science at Ufa State Aviation Technical University, Bachelor

Previous Industry: Banking (Software Engineer and Development Manager for Deutsche Bank, Information Technology Specialist at Citigroup, Software Developer at Goldman Sachs)

Start of Blockchain Career: One of the first to mine Ethereum in 2015, has been working full-time on Ethereum projects since June 2017

Relevant Links: Github, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn


Guillaume Ballet
Focus Area: Whisper protocol (a protocol that allows DApps on the same network to communicate with each other) and eWASM (Ethereum’s version of WebAssembly)

Projects: Development of version 6 of the Whisper protocol

Education: Masters of Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics (Grande École) at École Centrale de Nantes

Previous Industry: SaaS (Tech Lead at Alguha GmbH, Freelance Senior Software Engineer at Fyber)

Start of Blockchain Career: July 2017

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn


Meredith Baxter
Focus Area: Software engineer working at PegaSys. Building an enterprise grade, open-source Java based Ethereum client called Pantheon.

Projects: PegaSys

Education: Bachelor’s Degree, Digital Multimedia at Atlanta College of Art, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology

Previous Industry: SaaS (Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce Pardot, Software Engineer at Florence Healthcare), Tech (Software Engineering Intern at Google, Interactive Designer at IQ Interactive)

Start of Blockchain Career: November 2017

Relevant Links: GitHub, LinkedIn


Tim Beiko
Focus Area: Product Manager on ConsenSys’ protocol engineering group, PegaSys

Projects: PegaSys

Education: Ruby on Rails Development Bootcamp at Launch School, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at San Francisco State University, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at Concordia University

Previous Industry: Venture Capital (Venture Partner at Front Row Ventures), Artificial Intelligence (Product Owner at Element AI), Tech (Associate Product Manager Intern at Google), SaaS (Software Developer Intern at Spotify)

Start of Blockchain Career: October 2018

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn


Alex Beregszaszi
Focus Area: Core Developer, Ethereum

Projects: Lead of eWASM and Col-lead of Solidity (Ethereum’s native programming language)

Education: Master of Science (MSc), Advanced Software Engineering at University College Dublin

Previous Industry: FinTech (Co-Founder and CEO at Siqon, Founder at BLEND, Senior Embedded Software Engineer, Lead Systems Architect at Lead Payzone IRE)

Start of Blockchain Career: Founded Signatur in August 2014, working on research and development of different blockchain applications. Then founded BLEND in 2015 and created a blockchain-based payment card that allows users to send and receive BTC.

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn

Notes: Developed Quorum Wallet — The first wallet enabling the use of Bitcoin hardware wallets with Ethereum, Iudex — Winner of hack.ether.camp Ethereum hackathon, OpenCharity — 3rd Place, Dublin Blockchain Hackathon


Joseph Delong
Focus Area: PegaSys Research & Development

Projects: PegaSys

Education: Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science at McMurry University

Previous Industry: Military (United States Air Force) and Financial Services (USAA)

Start of Blockchain Career: Started working as Lead Blockchain Developer at USAA’s Blockchain Lab in May 2015. Delong later worked at Arithmetica to build a platform for computational math problems and democratizes the computation and data availability.

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn

Notes: Holds a patent for Cryptographic Key Generation from Biometric Data.


Daniel Ellison
Focus Area: EVM Language Researcher at ConsenSys.

Projects: Ellison works on low-level Lisp-like Language (LLL), a viable contract development language by strengthening and debugging the compiler, adding support for LLL to Truffle (an Ethereum contract deployment tool), and writing instructional articles on various strategies, and techniques to help people understand what contract development in LLL is like. Additionally, the ENS registry contract that is deployed to the Ethereum mainnet is Ellison’s implementation in LLL.

Education: N/A

Previous Industry: Information Technology, mainly worked on projects for companies using Python (Senior Developer at Tucows, Senior Engineer at Synacor)

Start of Blockchain Career: First Ethereum-related GitHub contribution was in August 2016

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn


Danno Ferrin
Focus Area: Software engineer working at PegaSys. Building an enterprise grade, open-source Java based Ethereum client called Pantheon.

Projects: PegaSys

Education: Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at Brigham Young University

Previous Industry: Tech (Software Engineer at Google and Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle)

Start of Blockchain Career: September 2018

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn

Notes: Holds a patent for the method and apparatus for the limitation of the mining of blocks on a blockchain.


Hudson Jameson
Focus Area: Developer, DevOps, and Comms at Ethereum, CEO at Hudsworth Consulting, Co-Founder, COO, and Blockchain Lead at Oaken Innovations

Projects: Works on a variety of development projects and DevOps tasks for Ethereum. Jameson is also the person who publishes the agenda ahead of core dev meetings. Here is an example for the March 29, 2019 meeting.

Education: Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at University of North Texas (USA)

Previous Industry: Financial Services (Software Developer at USAA)

Start of Blockchain Career: June 2014

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn


Mikhail Kalinin
Focus Area: Development of Ethereum 2.0 (a.k.a. Serenity) technologies like Beacon Chain (Phase 0) and Data Shard Chains (Phase 1).

Projects: Together with Anton Nashatyrev, Kalinin manages Ethereum Harmony (Java) implementation, which offers fast sync support with 22 GB disk usage and 100% Byzantium compatibility.

Education: N/A

Previous Industry: N/A

Start of Blockchain Career: First Ethereum-related GitHub contribution was in July 2015.

Relevant Links: GitHub


Pooja Ranjan
Focus Area: Editor and Contributing Writer for Ethereum Cat Herders, a Medium publication that focuses on Ethereum core development updates

Projects: Ethereum Cat Herders

Education: Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at Magadh University, M.Com at Institution of Management Education, India, Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Institution of Management Education, India

Previous Industry: Information Technology (Senior Software Engineer at Accenture and Project Management Officer at Magna Infotech), Accounting (Assistant Manager Business Development)

Start of Blockchain Career: Founded EtherWorld.co, a hub for news, upcoming project updates, technical blogs, and more in February 2017. In August 2017, Ranjan founded Avarch LLC, a software product development and consultancy organization that specializes in blockchain technology.

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn


Lane Rettig
Focus Area: Core Developer, Ethereum

Projects: eWASM, Specific projects include an eWASM AssemblyScript proof-of-concept implementing WRC20 and an Ewasm-AssemblyScript proof of concept multisig Ethereum wallet. Rettig has also contributed to projects like a Python implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), official Go implementation of the Ethereum protocol, and Carbonvote — a voting tool for ethereum community.

Education: Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Masters of Business Administration (MBA) at University of Pennsylvania

Previous Industry: Logistics (CTO at OnRout), FinTech (CTO at CurrencySpot), Healthcare/Information Technology (Founder at Seratis)

Start of Blockchain Career: First Ethereum-related GitHub contribution was in September 2017, Retttig joined the Ethereum organization on GitHub in November 2017.

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium


Brett Robertson
Focus Area: Ethereum Cat Herders, Layer 2 Solutions

Projects: Ethereum Cat Herders

Education: Bachelor’s Degree, Information Technology (Computer Science & Project Management) at University of Johannesburg, Bachelor Certificate, Philosophy at University of Birmingham

Previous Industry: Information Technology (Senior Project Manager at CSC), Government (Program Manager at Housing Authority WA), Investment Management (Independent Consultant at Yakka|Capital), Management Consulting (Senior Consultant at BBR Paramount Projects)

Start of Blockchain Career: January 2019

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn


Jacek Sieka
Focus Area: Head of Research Development at Status.im

Projects: Developing Nimbus Beacon Chain (an implementation of Ethereum Sharded Casper v2.1 Beacon Chain), nlvm (a LLVM-based compiler for the Nim language), and Bzeem (a proof-of-concept script that puts snapshots of Wikipedia on Swarm)

Education: Erasmus, Computer Science at Politecnico di Milano, Master of Science (MSc), Parallel and Distributed Systems at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Previous Industry: FinTech (Senior Software Engineer at Algorithmica Research, Head of Software Development at Grasshopper Pte Ltd)

Start of Blockchain Career: Started at Status in April 2018. Prior to this, Sieka led the development of an algorithmic/high-frequency trading platform.

Relevant Links: GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn


Charles St. Louis
Focus Area: Technical Marketing Consultant, MakerDAO

Projects: Worked on getting the ERC 1400 library of EIPs pushed forward, Projects related to Dai

Education: HBX CORe (Credential of Readiness) at Harvard, Ethereum Blockchain Development Certification at York University, Bachelor’s Degree, Applied Mathematics at Queen’s University, Certified Ethereum Developer, The BlockchainHub

Previous Industry: N/A

Start of Blockchain Career: Began working on blockchain implementation at RBC in May 2017. St. Louis then worked on blockchain development at EVERY* and Polymath.