Early Days of Ethereum

Bob Summerwill was a core developer on Ethereum's C++ client who later became a bridge builder across the ecosystem—working at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Hyperledger, and as Executive Director of the ETC Cooperative. He created the Early Days of Ethereum project to preserve the history of Ethereum's founding.

Background

Bob came to Ethereum with 15 years of C++ experience in the games industry. He first met Vitalik Buterin in 2014 but didn't dive in until 2015, when a contract brought him to Toronto just as Ethereum was launching:

"Moving to Toronto, there was just orders of magnitude more stuff going on - meetups and Anthony Di Iorio's Bitcoin Decentral co-working space and everything. So I got really addicted through that year and it was like, right, I can't not get involved."

He saw it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity:

"It's like you're there at the birth of the web or whatever and you've met Tim Berners-Lee and he's about to go live on the web. How can you not want to get involved?"

C++ Ethereum Client

Bob started volunteering on cpp-ethereum, setting himself the goal of getting Ethereum running on a smartwatch. This coincided with Gavin Wood's departure from the Foundation, leaving the C++ team understaffed:

"During that period I ended up being, I think, the only person in the world who was actually helping on that. No companies, nobody was helping."

He was hired into the Ethereum Foundation in early 2016. His first major contributions were bringing engineering discipline to a chaotic codebase:

"One of my first observations on joining the foundation is these people seem allergic to professionalism… Things as simple as like, have we got technical leads that actually lead? Have we got any project management? Have we got any IT? Have we got anything? And it's like, no, it's just like a jumble of people doing stuff."

The C++ codebase was particularly challenging—a 24-hour build that bundled solc, the test suite, client, and GUI applications into a single workspace:

"I worked out, infer a dependency diagram, map a path to pulling it all back into a monolithic workspace. Doing automated builds that we somehow didn't have. And specifically decoupling solc and the tests from the client."

One of his proudest achievements was making Solidity accessible:

"I got it so you could just do solc and that was a quick build. And then I did Homebrew, and it's like you could do brew install solc and it did it in like five seconds. And everyone's like 'oh my god, this is amazing.'"

The DAO and the Fork

Bob was on the C++ team during The DAO hack in June 2016, just three or four months after joining. His initial reaction aligned with Bitcoin's immutability ethos:

"My first reaction was: well, of course you don't do anything. It's an immutable blockchain, that's the whole point. You don't like the outcome? Well, you know, tough titties."

He observed the internal divisions within the Foundation:

"The thing that was really interesting to me was how different people's thoughts or perspectives were, even within the foundation. You'd have people say, working on Geth, going 'well of course we shouldn't do anything.' 'Well of course we should.' And it's like, I've been working with you for a year - what? You think that?"

He estimated about 80-85% supported the hard fork, with 15-20% opposed—creating a lasting schism in the community.

Historian of the Early Days

In late 2017, when Ming Chan's departure from the Foundation became known, Bob volunteered to help determine what good governance might look like. This led him down a rabbit hole of Ethereum history:

"I started gathering that list of who were the people that were around in the pre-foundation days… identifying anyone that I could that was involved with Ethereum pre-foundation or who worked for the foundation in those early years."

He created the foundational historical articles—Ethereum Foundation People and Ethereum Foundation Timeline—that became sources for Laura Shin's book "The Cryptopians" and other Ethereum histories.

Later Work

After leaving the Foundation, Bob became a bridge builder across the fragmented blockchain ecosystem:

• Enterprise Ethereum Alliance: Working on enterprise adoption
• Hyperledger: Cross-chain collaboration
• ETC Cooperative: Executive Director, supporting the Ethereum Classic ecosystem
• BlockApps: Head of Ecosystem (joined January 2025)

On the relationship between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic:

"I think that was a real failing. Because it was a legitimate, irreconcilable difference. But it was made even worse by this '100 ETH' purity pledge combined again with all the money's gone… That disenfranchised a good chunk of people who had invested in the pre-sale, who'd been part of that community, who'd genuinely been actively involved for those first two years."

The Early Days of Ethereum Project

Bob created this project to preserve and document Ethereum's founding history—the stories, the people, and the decisions that shaped the ecosystem. What began as research for understanding the Foundation's governance evolved into a comprehensive historical record.

"There is no canonical history of any of this. Like, how did Ethereum start? I mean, it's in people's heads - all secondhand stories that you hear from people that were around. But it's like, what's true, what isn't?"

Primary Source

This profile draws from Bob Summerwill's Early Days of Ethereum interview, where he discussed his journey into Ethereum, the C++ client development, The DAO hack, and the emergence of Ethereum Classic.