Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Alex van De Sande, Vlad Zamfir announced amongst exceptional DAO Curators

Stephan Tual
Stephan Tual’s Blog
4 min readApr 25, 2016

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In partnership with Daohub.org we were able to secure a set of DAO Curator signatories that reads like the Who’s Who of crypto. The Curator is composed of 11 members, all of which are current or former members of the Ethereum project, and all having had a direct hand in building the successful network that has now matured into Homestead.

Before I go into details, here’s quick but important refresher on DAO Curators. Curators are a set of signatories (usually a multisig) acting as a failsafe mechanism that indirectly prevent 51% attacks. I say indirectly because Curators do not add centralization to the DAO: they are not bosses, a Board, or dictators. They are nominated by the DAO’s community themselves, and can be fired at any time, for any reason. For more information on Curators, please read my primer.

So, back to the signatory list. Daohub.org announced:

Vitalik Buterin — Inventor and Founder, Ethereum Foundation. As the Inventor of Ethereum and one of the most respected blockchain thought leaders, Vitalik needs no introduction.

Gavin Wood — Founder — Ethcore. Before founding Ethcore, Dr. Wood was the CTO and co­founder of the Ethereum Project. He co-­designed, formalised and implemented the Ethereum Protocol, devised Whisper & the DEVp2p protocols, the Solidity programming language and the Mix IDE.

Christian Reitwießner — Solidity & C++ Team Lead, Ethereum Foundation. We’re very lucky to count Christian as one of our esteemed Slock.it advisors. Christian implemented Solidity, the Ethereum Smart Contract language.

Alex Van de Sande — Chief Designer, Mist — Ethereum Foundation — Alex is one of leading minds when it comes to UX/UI designs for Decentralized systems and the Designer behind the Ethereum interface and wallet, Mist.

Viktor Tron — Core Developer: Go Client — Ethereum Foundation. Viktor leads the development effort of Swarm, the decentralized storage solution part of the Ethereum Stack. Gavin Wood once called Viktor ‘one of the best minds in the field’ — we wholeheartedly agree.

Aeron Buchanan — Head of Research and Development — Ethcore. Aeron had an integral part to play in the development of Ethereum and in particular the management of the Berlin EthDev office.

Taylor Gerring — Director of Technology — Ethereum Foundation. Taylor Gerring has been working at the Foundation for as far as I can remember. His expertise in Devops is second to none and he was a catalyst for the successful deployment of the Ethereum presale.

Martin Becze — JS Client Developer- Ethereum Foundation. Martin is a long standing member of the Foundation and is leading the JS implementation as well as doing R&D on the EVM.

Gustav Simonsson — Core Developer — Ethereum Foundation. As a developer at Ethereum, Gustav worked closely with auditors, bug bounty hunters and the Ethereum dev team to ensure the security underlying the platform. His work on consensus protocols, core clients and network security helped launch the platform in 2015. Now he is a full stack dev at string.technology.

Vlad Zamfir — PoS research — Ethereum Foundation. Vlad, a theoretical mathematician, is the inventor of Casper, the Proof of Stake algorithm currently earmarked for deployment as part of the Ethereum network when Proof of Work is eventually phased out.

Fabian Vogelsteller — Lead Ðapp Developer: Mist — Ethereum Foundation. Fabian develops Mist, which currently takes the form of the Ethereum Wallet you all know and love. He works hand in hand with Alex Van de Sande to deliver the Metropolis experience. Additionally he works on web3.js the developer API for dapps.

The DAO’s scope: unlimited

The team at Slock.it is absolutely thrilled by this announcement. It validates all the hard work we put in the last 6 months meticulously putting together a Standard DAO Framework truly representative of the ideals of decentralization. We are now days away from a generalized, 100% decentralized, provably fair form of organization that is going to revolutionize the way we think about companies on the blockchain.

I’m particularly excited to see that while Daohub.org will at first explore the sharing economy and IoT applications of the blockchain, it won’t limit itself to these market verticals. This strongly hints this the “Mother of all DAOs” could surprise many. Think about The DAO purchasing other projects or strategically helping the development of the core Ethereum protocol. The mind boggles.

No doubt The DAO will now attract the attention of some amazing Proposals to develop some really exciting products. Slock.it is working on its own Proposal which is currently undergoing community review and will be made available soon.

For more information, please visit Daohub.org and its forums on https://forum.daohub.org/c/theDAO

About the Author

Stephan Tual is the Founder and COO of Slock.it.

Previously CCO for the Ethereum project, Stephan has three startups under his belt and brings 20 years of enterprise IT experience to the Slock.it project. Before discovering the Blockchain, Stephan held CTO positions at leading data analytics companies in London with clients including VISA Europe and BP.

His current focus is on the intersection of blockchain technology and embedded hardware, where autonomous agents can transact as part of an optimal “Economy of Things”.

Twitter: @stephantual
Contact:
stephan@slock.it

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Stephan Tual
Stephan Tual’s Blog

Stephan Tual, former CCO Ethereum, passionate Communicator and recognized Innovator with nearly 30 years of IT expertise.