Early Days of Ethereum

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Viktor Trón

Viktor Trón

Swarm founder and Ethereum Foundation early employee

(Feb 2014 to present)
Interview

DEVCON0 self-introduction

Viktor Trón is the founder of Swarm, Ethereum's decentralized storage layer, and one of the first employees on the go-ethereum team. A "freedom seeking individual" drawn to Ethereum through Austrian economics and anarchist ideals, he has been building the decentralized web stack since February 2014.

Background

Before Ethereum, Viktor worked at BBC News Labs on The Juicer project, ingesting and categorizing news archives. He discovered Bitcoin through a friend from an anarchist Facebook group:

"Bitcoin came into my life through a friend who I knew from an anarchist club or like Facebook group basically. So it's kind of, he introduced me to it on ideological grounds but of course I was very interested in tech as well."

Discovering Ethereum

Viktor first watched Vitalik Buterin's Miami presentation online, then attended a Coinscrum "Alternative Stage" meetup in London on February 3, 2014, where Gavin Wood presented Ethereum:

"I left the job because I found Ethereum. I was very excited right away. So when Gavin visited this kind of new web meetup… I was absolutely taken aback and I found it was amazing and game changer."

He came prepared with challenging questions about sharding, but was won over:

"Bit by bit when I understood that they all had answers to every question that I can ever think of, then that's when I got to admit that they are probably the geniuses I really want to look up to and have in my environment to learn from."

The next day, Viktor was already hacking on the C++ codebase. He met Gavin at a cafe in Dalston and was added to the early Skype group (around 20 people at the time).

Gavin Wood - Ethereum - Live - Coinscrum - Alternative Stage - London
Gavin Wood presents Ethereum at Coinscrum Alternative Stage in London, February 2014. Recorded by IamSatoshi, Audio by Aaron Couples.
by Satoshi Pollen (IamSatoshi Documentary), February 03, 2014

Joining Geth

Viktor met Jeff Wilcke at one of the first London Ethereum meetups. He began contributing to go-ethereum and was hired by Jeff in September/October 2014:

"I kind of saw that it's quite an international crowd and from all over the world kind of doing this thing. So I kind of started to take it very seriously. As I said, I kind of left my job and joined the ranks."

Jeff Wilcke described Viktor in his first development update: "Vik is a crazy math-head and is currently hacking away at the new DEVP2P and testing it rigourously. I've known Vik all the way back since the start of the project somewhere in Jan/Feb, he's a great guy and a real asset to this team."

Viktor was among the first paid employees on the Geth team, joining around the same time as Alex van de Sande and Felix Lange.

The Holy Trinity and Swarm

Viktor was deeply committed to the Holy Trinity vision—Ethereum for compute, Swarm for storage, and Whisper for messaging—that emerged in May 2014 at talks in Whitechapel, London.

He created Ethersphere as a GitHub organization for Swarm development, working with Daniel Nagy and later Zsolt Felföldi.

Despite Swarm being officially defunded during the 2015 austerity period, Jeff quietly allowed the team to continue working:

"I remember that maybe it's not a secret anymore but Jeff kind of let us keep working on Swarm throughout this period."

The first Swarm release was included in Geth 1.5 in December 2016. Viktor recruited Nick Johnson to the Swarm team, where Nick developed ENS before spinning it out.

Swarm Independence

Viktor continued working within the Ethereum Foundation until 2018-2019, when the Swarm codebase was separated from Geth. The Swarm Association was founded in Switzerland, and the Swarm token was launched in 2021. The new Bee client was developed using libp2p instead of devp2p.

Swarm work continues to the present day with Viktor leading the project.

Primary Source

This profile draws from Viktor Trón's Early Days of Ethereum interview, which provides extensive first-hand accounts of discovering Ethereum, the go-ethereum team, the Holy Trinity vision, and Swarm's development

Back-links

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