Thanks Ming

When Ming took the job at the Foundation, she was told that we were a few months away from running out of funds. The situation was dire: there were 3-4 different entities, with different accounting and legal costs in 4 jurisdictions (🇨🇭🇩🇪 🇬🇧&🇳🇱), and mgmt infighting

[Blog] To Infinity and Beyond! blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/31/to-…

Bitcoin price fell from 600 to 300 just after the presale, before we could touch most of it so right there half of the money we had raised was gone. The other half was spent developing the clients and launching the network, by August.

The network was live, but we still needed years of development and the money was running out. We had ether, but it was still under $1. They asked Geth devs (and therefore Mist) to take a 10% haircut, mgmt took more. CPP team was almost all cut out. Everyone was feeling down.

Back then, many still thought ethereum was a scam/vaporware and never going to launch. We proved them wrong. But as local saying, we had swimmed, swimmed and were about to die on the beach.

Then, by the end of 2015, things started turning around. The multiple entities were closed and our haircuts were buying us time. Ming spent most of her time cleaning up an excessive and expensive legal infrastructure and going through audits and hell of paperwork.

Then Devcon 1 came around (Devcon 0 was a internal developers only get together in Berlin), and Microsoft was a sponsor, Nick Szabo was giving a keynote, it was a clear message that the industry took us seriously.

This was followed by the price, which passed $10 and felt like crazy. Suddenly we had a longer runway and everyone could breathe again. There was and still is a lot of work ahead of us...

But probably none of that would have happened had @mingchan88 not stepped in her role. She was never in the forefront, had no public face other than a few words before Devcon. But on the inside she was crucial, and she worked through multiple Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Years

The Ethereum Foundation is far from perfect, of course. We can do a lot to be more open and transparent, and to act less like a raunchy startup but the leadership of a $200 bilion ecosystem. But to get here, a lot of people had to do big sacrifices that went unthanked.

Not anymore.

Thanks Ming. I’ll miss our two hour skype calls about the history of China and your tales about Media Lab. You deserve some rest and family time.

(History from memory, dates and details might be slightly wrong)