Early Days of Ethereum

Anthony "Texture" D'Onofrio was Ethereum's first "community guy" and one of the earliest contributors to the project. A designer and full-stack developer by background, he became the trusted person everyone talked to in the early Skype groups, helping shape Ethereum's community culture from its very first weeks.

Background: Peace, Love, Human

Before Ethereum, Texture had already built one cult - though he shut it down when he realized what it had become. In his early 20s, he founded Peace, Love, Human, spending three years homeless and wandering, setting up free hug events to make people smile:

"I started this group called Peace, Love, Human, because I was sitting in a shitty basement apartment in San Francisco, and I was watching the news, and I was like, what if there was a religion that didn't have any beliefs? We just went out and did nice shit."

By his estimate, he gave over 100,000 free hugs. This experience in community building proved valuable when he joined Ethereum:

"It was my first foray into cult building, which obviously I took into my role in Ethereum, and I feel like the Ethereum cult is going pretty well."

Revolutionary Technologist. Ethereum Founding Member. Creator of DAS.

Anthony D'Onofrio

by Anthony D'Onofrio

The Vision

Texture had a roommate who tried to get him into Bitcoin at $1, but he dismissed it as "internet nerd money." Years later, while making cannabis edibles in California, he finally listened to the Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast with Adam B. Levine and Andreas Antonopoulos. What followed was transformative:

"I had what I can only describe as a biblical vision… just this massive data download into my head where I could basically see the future visually. I just saw the whole thing playing out in front of me."

He drove 20 hours to Washington State to meet Adam, spending nine hours in his hot tub discussing the vision. When Texture asked to be connected to anyone working on similar ideas, Adam forwarded him a white paper that Vitalik Buterin had just sent out:

"I actually had envisioned everything in the paper before. I was more blown away by the fact that I found it and Vitalik a week after having the vision."

Joining Ethereum

Texture was among the very first people to join the original Ethereum Skype group, alongside Vitalik, Charles Hoskinson, and Adam B. Levine. He quickly became the person everyone trusted:

"I was kind of like the dude that everybody trusted. So like whenever anybody wanted to talk to somebody, they would come talk to me, which is why I got so much information about what was going on all the time."

When Vitalik created an early website for Ethereum, Texture intervened:

"Vitalik posted this website that he made. It was piss yellow. He had stolen some other shit coin's logo and just put Ethereum on it. And I was like, please don't post this. Give me till tomorrow. So I spun up a logo, sent it to him."

Texture couldn't go to Zug because his girlfriend was pregnant, which affected his position in the emerging hierarchy. He later created the "Watercooler" Skype group for informal discussions.

Social Operating System

Texture saw Ethereum as far more than a cryptocurrency - he envisioned it as a "social operating system" for human coordination:

"A social operating system for allowing people to encode their values… anything with value, creating incentive structures. Contracts that are enforced at the exact level that they were designed to… What happens when you empower people to be able to create value in their local communities?"

He was a strong proponent of the Holy Trinity vision - compute, storage, and messaging - and the cypherpunk ideal of maintaining a free and open internet.

The Miami House

Texture was at the Miami house in January 2014 where many early contributors met for the first time. He has been vocal about his assessment of Charles Hoskinson, whom he met there:

"Literally the moment I met him in Miami, I shook his hand and I was like, 'Oh God, he's a fucking sociopath.'"

Texture has consistently stated that Charles was not removed from Ethereum because he wanted to make it a corporation, but because of his behavior and inability to be trusted.

On UX and Technical Idealism

A former designer, Texture has been critical of Ethereum's failure to achieve mainstream usability:

"People think if you build it, they will come. You can't just build it. You have to build it and then you have to make it a button, a single button. It has to be so simple your grandma can do it and not destroy her life."

He observed that autistic developers in open source often "beat the designers into the ground," believing "the terminal is the greatest interface of all time" - a perspective that hampers adoption.

Crowdsale Launch

Texture was with Vitalik in San Francisco when the crowdsale launched:

"We were in the Westfield Mall in the food court… he just looked up at me and he goes, 'oh, the crowdsale went live.' Because that wasn't planned."

Later Work

In mid-December 2015, Texture and Vitalik did a live-streamed "Salon Talk" to DCTRL in Vancouver:

Texture later created Texture Punx as a joke because he thought CryptoPunks were ugly, which accidentally became popular.

In January 2025, with concerns about the Ethereum Foundation's direction, Texture wrote an opinion piece for Coindesk:

The Ethereum Foundation Has Lost Its Way

https://coindesk.com

by Anthony D'Onofrio, January 21, 2025

He remains in the space out of a sense of responsibility:

"That's why I'm still here in this space, that and the guilt of learning what people do with the things you create and feeling some sort of responsibility to kind of try to nudge in a direction."

Other Interviews

Primary Source

This profile draws from Anthony D'Onofrio's Early Days of Ethereum interview, which provides first-hand accounts of Ethereum's earliest days and community formation.