Vitalik Buterin: "I tried to be a trainee at Ripple Back in the Day (mid-2013)"

On Friday, April 19, Vitalik Buterin, the Canadian computer scientist of Russian origin who invented Ethereum, revealed a "fun fact" about it: "I've tried being a trainee at Ripple in the day (mid-2013) ".

Before looking at the context of Vitalik's remarks, we must remember that the first ideas behind Vitalik's initial Ethereum proposal in December 2013 came after his visit to Israel in October 2013:

"Let's start with the very first version of what will eventually become Ethereum, when it was not even called Ethereum, when I visited Israel in October 2013, I spent quite a bit of time with the Mastercoin team, and even suggested After thinking about what they were doing, I sent the team a proposal to generalize their protocol and support multiple types of contracts without adding a feature set as vast and complex. "

Vitalik's conviction of trying to get a job at Ripple is made via a tweet sent in response to the following tweet by Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase:

This is a very good title https://t.co/CDq18kfSjP

– Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) April 19, 2019

Vitalik admitted that in mid-2013, while he was living in Canada, he had been trying to come to California to work as an intern for the company that had been renamed (in September 2013) to Ripple Labs but had not done so since. the company sponsoring the visa must have been at least one year old:

Trivia: I tried to be an intern at Ripple at the end of the year (mid-2013), but visa problems in the United States, due to the fact that the company only existed for 9 months and that my minimum was 1 year, have stopped me.

– Vitalik non-ether donor (@VitalikButerin) April 19, 2019

It is important to note that OpenCoin (which originally called Ripple Labs), the company Vitalik was to apply for at the time, was co-founded by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb in September 2012, which means that Vitalik must have applied for a job around June 2013.

Then, Justin Sun, founder and CEO of the TRON Foundation, who would have (according to his Linkedin profile) been hired by Ripple Labs in December 2013 "as the first employee of [sic] Greater China Region "and worked for the company until January 2016, decided to join the conversation:

When I discovered these facts of @justmoon At the end of 2013 / early 2014, if we had both been to Ripple, I am sure we would have been friends since we would have been only two millennia! ❤@VitalikButerin

– Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) April 19, 2019