Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s founder and leader (hence the man who created second-generation blockchain technologies) tells the world how he tried to get an internship at Ripple Labs in San Francisco –and failed in a casual tweet.
According to Mr. Buterin, he tried to work at Ripple as an intern during mid-2013. That’s the same year in which he started to develop the project that later became the Ethereum blockchain and network. The reason that kept him away from the company behind the XRP currency was red-tape related to the American visa.
Ethereum’s creator is not a young developer looking for work anymore, but one of the world’s foremost experts in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Oh yes, he’s also a cryptocurrency millionaire. But aside from his personal wealth, his network was the first one to support the development and deployment of decentralized applications and smart contracts.
That achievement has given his network and himself a vast prestige that remains current today, even as the Ethereum network faces significant challenges at the present time. He said that the reason he couldn’t make it to Ripple as an intern was that the company was newly founded.
In his own words:
Mr. Buterin needed a visa so he could pursue his career inside the US as he is Russian. And he’s not alone in being denied working options because of visa problems. His shared his “fun fact” to complement a message posted by Brian Armstrong (Coinbase’s CEO) in which he was detailing how Eric Yuan (Zoom’s CEO) was denied a US visa for eight times in a row. That didn’t stop Mr. Yuan’s career who now enjoys an excellent reputation in the technology world.
And the lack of a visa didn’t stop Mr. Buterin either. Ethereum is more prominent and more influential in the crypto verse than Ripple, and its cryptocurrency is also more substantial than XRP.
XRP is indeed augmenting its use in the banking and remittance industry. But a recent revelatory study reveals that about half of Forbes Billion dollar companies use the Ethereum blockchain in one way or another. And Ethereum’s blockchain is several years younger than Ripple’s, so it’s gained more acceptance in less time.
What would have been of the crypto world should Mr. Buterin been able to work at Ripple? Maybe it would have enhanced his creative drive. Perhaps we wouldn’t have an Ethereum network. It’s utterly impossible to know for sure. But the one thing that remains clear is that apparent failure to achieve a goal in the immediate future doesn’t necessarily mean that a person’s plans or future success are done for. Mr. Buterin and Mr. Yuan are living proof to that effect.
The anecdote also speaks about Mr. Buterin’s resilience, which is going to be a vital asset if Ethereum is going to overcome its current challenges. For the last few months, the network has been facing direct competition from Tron, EOS and other third-generation blockchains, and it’s not been faring well.
Ethereum has been falling behind mainly because of performance issues and the price of gas, which is expensive when compared to the low costs in more up-to-date and better-performing blockchains. And that’s why the project needs the founder to set things straight.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
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