Early Days of Ethereum

Guillaume Ballet is a Geth core developer who joined the Ethereum Foundation in October 2017.

Shortly after joining, Guillaume presented "Whisper: Achieving Darkness" at Devcon 3 in Cancún (November 2017) alongside Vlad Gluhovsky, who was the primary developer of the Whisper protocol. The talk explained Whisper's privacy properties and technical architecture - including its "dark, ephemeral" design goals where messages could not be traced to their origin.

Whisper was the decentralized messaging layer of the original Holy Trinity of Web3, alongside Ethereum (computation) and Swarm (storage). The protocol was eventually deprecated, with Waku serving as its spiritual successor.