Early Days of Ethereum

Taylor Gerring was one of the earliest Ethereum contributors and a founding director of the Ethereum Foundation. He was responsible for the Ethereum website and crowdsale infrastructure, later contributing to go-ethereum development.

Background

Taylor grew up in South Florida and studied Management of Information Systems in Orlando - a degree combining business and computer skills that proved valuable in Ethereum's chaotic early startup days. After working in Chicago, he shifted from proprietary software back to open source, which led him to Bitcoin.

He discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and became deeply involved through 2013, mining and writing about alternative projects like Namecoin and BitMessage for Bitcoin Magazine. He created PayThru, a Bitcoin tipping system for Twitter and websites.

Path to Ethereum

Taylor met Mihai Alisie in Milan in late 2013 while working for Wendell Davis at Hive Bitcoin wallet. Mihai connected him to Vitalik Buterin and the emerging Ethereum team.

In January 2014, Taylor attended the Miami Bitcoin conference where Vitalik first publicly announced Ethereum. He stayed at the house Anthony Di Iorio rented, sleeping in a hammock between two trees in the backyard. Being in his "photography era," Taylor captured many iconic photos of these early days, including the famous image of Vitalik mobbed by questioners after his talk.

Zug and the Foundation

Taylor arrived in Switzerland on February 9, 2014, joining the team at an Airbnb in Meierskoppel near Zug. The early months were chaotic as the global team worked toward launching the crowdsale.

Taylor was responsible for the website and crowdsale infrastructure, constantly updating content as legal guidance evolved. He later described the challenge:

"Getting the team kind of motivated up and going to go from we just met and within a couple of few weeks here, we started spinning prototypes of the website and working together in our different capacities to kind of get this machine in motion and prepared for what would eventually become the crowd sale."

He was one of three original directors of the Ethereum Foundation along with Vitalik and Mihai, chosen because they were physically present in Switzerland to sign the founding documents. He later resigned from the board along with Mihai.

The "Red Wedding"

Taylor was present for what became known as the "Red Wedding" in June 2014, when Vitalik made the decision to remove Charles Hoskinson and Amir Chetrit from leadership positions. Taylor recalled it as "a very, very uncomfortable day" that was "emotionally exhausting."

The decision placed Taylor and Stephan Tual in leadership positions. Taylor believes this change enabled Ethereum to ship on time:

"By choosing to put Stephan and myself in place in leadership positions… I feel like we had the team in place to actually get Ethereum delivered."

Technical Contributions

Beyond website and organizational work, Taylor contributed to go-ethereum development:

• Wrote unit tests for the Go client
• Implemented the first complete JSON-RPC API (taking responsibility for some of its "terrible namings")
• Traveled to speak at conferences where Vitalik was unavailable

Web3 Vision

Taylor was a strong proponent of Gavin Wood's vision of the three pillars of decentralization - compute, storage, and messaging (the Holy Trinity). He was drawn to the cypherpunk ideal of maintaining a free and open internet:

"My focus was on how do we maintain an open Internet in light of the fact that we have corporations and governments that would like to apply censorship and control over it."

DEVCON1

Taylor created the colored Ethereum logo (in Microsoft colors) that became the unofficial logo for DEVCON1 in London. The conference represented a turning point:

"It felt like we had finally made it… there's literally a room full of people here, not just like techie teams, but people in business development."

Taylor left the Ethereum Foundation in December 2016, having seen the project through from its earliest days to a functioning global platform.

Photos

Many of Taylor's photographs from 2014 are collected on the Taylor Gerring Photos page.

Primary Source

This profile draws from Taylor Gerring's Early Days of Ethereum interview, which provides first-hand accounts of Ethereum's founding period.