Falling Down the 'Ethereum Rabbit Hole' With Eth 2.0 Developer Ben Edgington

“There was a period [in early 2016] when all our sales teams … were coming back from client meetings saying that all our clients want to talk about something called blockchain. Can you find out what it is?”

That’s Ben Edgington, the lead product owner of the Ethereum 2.0 client Teku and the new co-host for the CoinDesk podcast series, “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.”

The rabbit hole

He fell down the “Ethereum rabbit hole” in 2016 when his colleagues at Hitachi Europe, his employer at the time, recommended he look into the buzz about blockchain technology.

His research compelled him to spend his weekends and evenings learning more about Ethereum. Then, in October 2017, Edgington made his passion his full-time job.

“I joined ConsenSys in October 2017 initially to work on enterprise Ethereum topics but my passion was really on public network stuff. I just love to understand things from the bottom up. I like to understand the nuts and bolts of what makes things work,” said Edgington.

See also: How Staking and Eth 2.0 Makes the Ethereum Economy More ‘Sustainable’

This naturally led him to focus more of his time at ConsenSys on Ethereum 2.0 and developing its base layer technology through Teku. Written in the programming language Java, Teku is branded as the software client for institutions that want to stake their ether on Eth 2.0 and earn validator rewards.

Speaking to the development process for Eth 2.0, Edgington admitted the open-source nature of the technology and protocol results in a “massive coordination problem” for developers. Without a single source of authority guiding research and development, the work to advance Eth 2.0 is often inefficient and difficult.

That said, this entire process has its strengths.

“I would much rather be doing things this way than in a [private] lab,” said Edgington, adding, “It ends up with a much better product at the end of the process.”

To hear more about Edgington’s work on Eth 2.0 and his career in blockchain, listen to the full podcast episode.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

Valid Points newsletter - https://www.coindesk.com/newsletter/valid-points

What’s New in Eth2 newsletter - https://eth2.news