Early Days of Ethereum

Jacob Czepluch was an intern at ETHDEV in Berlin during the tumultuous period following Ethereum's mainnet launch. A fly-on-the-wall during the funding crisis that would reshape the Foundation, he also founded the Copenhagen Ethereum Meetup in July 2015—which he has run for over 10 years.

Background

Jacob discovered Ethereum in late 2014 while studying computer science at the IT University of Copenhagen. Initially interested in writing his bachelor thesis on Bitcoin, he became captivated by Ethereum's broader vision.

In spring 2015, Jacob and two friends—Nikolaj Zangenberg Lollike and Simon Oliver Malone—wrote their bachelor thesis on blockchain technology, focusing on Ethereum. The small size of the ecosystem meant direct contact with the Ethereum Foundation:

"Because the Ethereum ecosystem, so to speak, was so small back then, we were in contact with the Ethereum Foundation during the internship. I think I opened my first issue in March 2015 to the C++ client or something like that."

Sharing their thesis with the Foundation led to internship offers. Jacob was the only one of the three ready to leave academia:

"I was tired of studying already, only after a bachelor, and the other two guys wanted to continue, so I was like, okay, I'm going to do this."

The Copenhagen Meetup

Before his internship, Jacob founded the Copenhagen Ethereum Meetup on July 14, 2015—just two weeks before Ethereum's mainnet launch. This early community-building would prove valuable: when chaos struck during his first week in Berlin, he had a presentation ready to give.

The Berlin Internship

Jacob arrived at the Berlin office in August 2015, originally planning to work on the C++ team in London. But the Foundation's funding crisis intervened:

"I was actually supposed to have done my internship on the C++ team in London, but a couple of weeks before that, I was told, sorry, we can't do it anyway because we don't have the money anymore."

Instead, he joined the Python client team in Berlin, starting just weeks after mainnet launched. His second day coincided with the first major consensus bug—a chain split between Geth and the C++/Python clients:

"The first week I was there was when there was like the first big fork where the Go client forked from the C++ and Python client… And it happened, I think, the second day I was there. And that was the same day that there was a meetup planned in the office."

With the developers scrambling to fix the consensus issue, the scheduled meetup attendees stood around with nothing happening. Jacob stepped up:

"I was just sitting there in the corner working and I was like, no, we can't do this because there's so many people who are just like looking. Some started leaving. So I kind of ad hoc jumped in and gave a presentation on Ethereum back then that I had given a couple of weeks before back in Copenhagen."

Witnessing the Foundation Crisis

From his corner of the Berlin office, Jacob watched the political drama unfold as Ming Chan began cutting costs and the C++ team faced defunding:

"Sitting as the only person working on the Python client in that office in my small corner, I had a lot of fun kind of following how people came and went and went into Gavin's office and had a chat there with him and Jutta or whatever."

He observed the early formation of what would become Ethcore (later Parity Technologies):

"I was witnessing that without knowing what was going on. I had no insight into the finances of the Foundation or anything like that. I only found out about most of those things later."

Jacob also had memorable late-night encounters with Christoph Jentzsch, who would visit the office to work on cross-client testing:

"I had one night where I think I let him into the office at midnight and we had a little bit of a chat. I got to know him. He told me about all the testing he was doing and how they were testing."

DEVCON1

Jacob attended DEVCON1 in London in November 2015, an experience that transformed his career trajectory:

"I've never been good at sitting still on a chair for a long period of time. But there I was at every talk from the beginning in the morning until the end… Before that I had an idea that I thought it would be interesting to continue working with Ethereum. But after DEVCON1, I was like, I have to do this. There's no other way for me. I'm not going back to the university."

He watched foundational projects being presented for the first time:

"I remember clearly Maker was presented. I was like, OK, we can do stablecoins. Amazing… I think Fabian Vogelsteller and Alex van de Sande and some other people presented the ERC-20 token standard or the early version of it."

Jacob was also involved with the Raiden Network, which received positive feedback at the conference.

What struck him most was the purity of the event compared to later DEVCONs:

"DEVCON1, it was just about the technology. I think maybe there were three booths or something like that that just had a couple of stickers… There was one stage and everyone was like in the same room. And in the evenings, people would go out for dinner maybe, but there was not a single side event. There was not a single party."

He described it as "the golden days":

"It was really just the golden days, I felt like. There were so many inspired people and ideas, and people only talked about tech."

Continued Involvement

Though December 2015 marks the end of his formal internship, Jacob has remained actively involved in the Ethereum ecosystem. He continues to run the Copenhagen Ethereum Meetup—now over a decade old—and has attended every DEVCON since that transformative first experience in London.

"For me, the DEVCON1 is like one of my best memories of these 10 years, simply because it was just so inspiring and motivating."

Primary Source

This profile draws from Jacob Czepluch's Early Days of Ethereum interview, which provides first-hand accounts of the Berlin office during the Foundation's funding crisis and the formative DEVCON1 experience.