Jeffrey Wilcke
- Grid Games; founder
- Ethereum, ex co-founder
- Ethereum Foundation, ex-Technical Steering Group
- Got back into the news after selling 92,000 ETH around Christmas 2019. From CoinSpice (26-12-2019):
"Trustnodes narrowed the culprit down to Jeffrey Wilcke, a prominent Ethereum developer and co-founder. He apparently did send 92,000 ETH (roughly $11.5 million) to Kraken on Christmas. Their analysis used “an account that moved 408,000 eth in January 2016,” then well-known as having been funded by the Ethereum Foundation. “Presumably the funding was part of the initial distribution that the founding team got at the inception of Ethereum,” they suggested.
That same address “shows continuous, but gradual, selling or movement of funds until this Christmas it sees a sharp drop in funds.” It still retains some $27 million worth of ETH more. Wilcke was a lead developer of the ethereal Go client and coded alongside the from 2013. He apparently has formally left, and is working on a video game project for Grid Games, which matches the patterns of Ethereum devs generally who cashout as they depart. When peppered by skeptical enthusiasts as to why, Wilcke insisted, “I worked my fucking ass off since December 2013 until I was burned out and couldn’t continue anymore. I was broken.”"
"Another computer programmer, Jeffrey Wilcke was in the Netherlands working on Mastercoin, the first ICO, when he heard about Ethereum. He got so interested that he decided to write an implementation of it in Google’s Go language on the quiet. He was added to the founders roster alongside Gavin Wood in early 2014.
Wilcke had begun his software implementation—which was later renamed Go Ethereum, and then simply “Geth”—at roughly the same time as Wood began his version on C++. But each, being unaware of the other, had worked separately. Having two implementations later turned out to be fortuitous: there would always be a backup. But, after the controversial hard fork, a series of hacks, and the birth of his son, Wilcke handed the supervision of Geth over to his right-hand man Peter Szilagyi. At the end of last year, he hinted at the frustrations that had caused him to quit.
Now, with his brother Joey, he has a games development studio, Grid Games, and recently put some of the ether he received from Ethereum up for sale to fund development. Grid Games has now begun recruiting developers."
