Ralf S.

immediately grabbed by the concept of a trustless mediation between buyers and sellers. He thought mostly about the technology itself, not trading; at the end of 2013, he invested a small amount in Bitcoin, but didn’t pay much attention to it until Ethereum showed up. This marked the emergence of smart blockchains: the igniting spark of Ralf’s passion to contribute his creative energy to the coming tech revolution.

In 2016, developers were requested on Bitcointalk.org to assist with coding the first Ethereum fork, which was trying to become a decentralized storage solution. Ralf liked the idea behind Shift a lot, applied to join its team, and went on to help build the backend and frontend, including a web wallet running on Zeronet.

At that time, Ethereum’s codebase could be easily abused by attackers with enough hashrate to perform a 51% attack. The project was eventually hit hard: some of the early investors, and devs’ friends, had their Shift wallets hacked. Thus this was a crisis for both the project, and the developers personally. The immediate reaction was to want to create a “Golden Block” of around one million new tokens for compensating the victims through a hard fork, as the Ethereum project had done in response to the infamous Dao hack.

However, the community didn’t support taking the easy way out. Generating new tokens to compensate victims would have devalued everyone else’s existing tokens through inflation. Ultimately, the team adhered to the community’s wishes, upholding the democratic spirit of a decentralized project. This was more important to Ralf, in particular, than avoiding personal losses. The team therefore ended up compensating the victims from its own fund.

Never cutting corners, and under such strains on his spirit and energy, Ralf nonetheless recognized then that a new platform called Lisk would be better suited than Ethereum for maximizing Shift’s security and its technological potential. Although Lisk was still young and not ready for adoption, Ralf’s team began porting Shift to a Lisk fork, and built a forging mainnet even before the Lisk project itself had done so.

I personally can’t imagine assuming the daunting task of a port after just passing through so much upheaval. Ralf wasn’t deterred by the challenges. After everything that had happened, Ralf still just cared about doing what was best for the project, like he always had.

Compensating victims of the hack from the project’s fund was the proper thing to do, but this move in turn led to further challenges for Shift as some developers demanded salaries that the project could no longer support. In one case, a former developer eventually left the project in August 2017 to create an ICO by forking Shift. This developer’s sudden departure caused roadmap release delays and also ironically instigated concerns that the Shift project, by association, was just a cash grab – despite that the ex-dev’s actions were in fact prompted by the team’s unwillingness to sell out their principles of democratic, community governance on one hand, and responsibility toward the victims of the hack, on the other hand.

With the project facing such external and internal strains, which started with the hack in 2016 and culminated in its aftermath a year later, August 2017 was a brutal time. The value of Shift, which had previously been in CoinMarketCap.com’s Top 100, plummeted. The remaining team members, who had continued upholding their integrity to the spirit of the project since the beginning, had been tested both morally and financially.

I asked Ralf to explain his decision back in August 2016 to port the project to Lisk, given the immensely demoralizing circumstances of that time. In his characteristic matter-of-factness, Ralf’s reply was movingly plain: “Even though the storage solution was functional, it wasn’t satisfying enough.” He added: “Moving from Zeronet to IPFS meant starting back from scratch. We continued and crawled back up to where we are now. It was a move we never regretted.”

I probed him to elaborate. Why did he care about Shift so much? He told me: “If I had left Shift last summer like the rest, I could have made a fortune elsewhere. But if you start a chain (in my case, join), then there’s a responsibility to do all you can to deliver the product. So one part is not letting down the team. The other is the interest/joy of accomplishing.”

Finally, I asked Ralf about the result he hoped for from his work. I was expecting him to talk about Shift changing the world. But Ralf’s answer was nothing so predictable. It simply expressed his focus and resolve, which I think probably stem from his ability to keep his eyes on the road, no matter how far or near his destination: “About the result: if the storage layer and blockchain are running stable, then we can start building upon that basis. So it’s not the end, but a beginning of the next chapter.”

In my opinion, Shift is going to show the world what can be achieved by combining the peerless resolve and human grit of Ralf’s team with great community passion. We also have benefited from standing on the shoulders of giants: Lisk and IPFS are fantastic open-source projects, and as Ralf points out, reusing their code has enabled us to build new tools like Phantom and Jenga without being too preoccupied in core-related development areas. All of the obstacles that the project faced in 2017 have been overcome; all of the 2017 release goals have been fulfilled. Shift has reached an unstoppable stage of momentum and maturity: the team has become stronger than ever, and Ralf is leading again in 2018, up to Shift’s completion as the first next-generation dApp platform with its own natively integrated “killer dApp” driving mass adoption. It’s going to be an incredible year and we are grateful to Ralf: for what lies behind us, and ahead.