In March 2014, Jarrad founded the Amsterdam Ethereum Meetup which had its inaugural session at Eetcafé de Doffer on 4th March 2014 with 37 attendees.

There were three presentations that day:

• Intro to Smart Contracts - Jarrad Hope
• Writing Smart Contracts - Joris Bontje
• Q&A - Jeff Wilcke

(The video of the meetup was published later that month on EtherCasts, the channel created by Joris Bontje and Joel Dietz)

By the second event in April the bar’s occupancy was maxed out.

Jarrad did early work on Trust Davis and contributed to Geth. In April 2014, he started work on an ethereumj fork to add Android support, creating ethereumj-android.

In May 2014, he started work on Syng which later became Status. He ceased his other work and went full-time on Ethereum during Q1 2015. Syng was a recipient of a devgrant which was mentioned in Wendell Davis’s talk at DEVCON1: