Early Days of Ethereum

John Wolpert was present at DEVCON2 in Shanghai representing IBM, at a time when IBM were exploring the possibility of building their blockchain 1.0 stack on top of Ethereum technology rather than Hyperledger Fabric. There was a narrow window of opportunity for this grand union, but IBM's timeline was oriented around launching before R3's Corda, and the C++ relicensing effort did not work out.

Wolpert later joined ConsenSys and became the driving force behind the Baseline Protocol, which uses the Ethereum mainnet as a common frame of reference for enterprise business processes.