Anthony Di Iorio is a busy guy. He is a co-founder of the Ethereum Project, partner and founder of KryptoKit and Cointalk.ca, a founding member of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada (where he is also Executive Director and a board member), founder of Toronto Bitcoin Meetup, and founder of coworking space and soon-to-launch accelerator Decentral.

We had a chance to speak with him Monday about all of his projects.

Cointelegraph: First, I would love to know the Ethereum team’s thoughts on the crowdsale. Has it gone according to plan? Exceeded expectations?

Anthony Di Iorio: I think everything has gone to plan. I think we’re happy with the levels so far.

It was hard for us to know exactly how much people would be putting toward it, especially since it’s uncapped. I think we’re probably in the area of what we were expecting at this time.

CT: How has your experience with community building within Bitcoin translated to Ethereum?

AI: I think it’s been quite helpful in the Toronto area. Most of the community building is being done by Stephan Tual in the UK, so he’s been doing most of the communications and organizing things on a global basis.

We do hold a meetup here once a month for Ethereum that coincides with our weekly meetup groups.

I’ve been traveling quite a bit. I have done talks on Ethereum, so I go to quite a few conferences, and it has definitely helped to get things going, but Stephen Tual deserves most of the credit for our community building and the growth of our community worldwide.

CT: You’re also involved with a bunch of other startups, organizations and projects. Where are you devoting the majority of your time right now?

AI: The most of my time is going toward Decentral in Toronto, Kryptokit and Rushwallet. I’m also doing my weekly meetups, and I’m hoping to be able to spend more time with the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada and the Global Bitcoin Alliance in the future. But because of Ethereum and some of the other things I’ve been working on it’s been more difficult to spend as much time on the non-profit things I’m working on, which was my main focus for 2013, but has since shifted to some of my other projects in 2014.

- Mr. Di Iorio

CT: Can you give us any insights into what the teams at Decentral are working on? What at Decentral has you most excited right now?

AI: In Decentral, we’ve got quite a few companies here working out of the coworking space. We’ve got Kryptokit, so we’ve got about five from the Kryptokit team working out of here — Kryptokit and Rushwallet.

We’ve got the guys from Bitcoinsultants, which is a security consultancy group for Bitcoin. We’ve got three different exchanges from Canada that have offices here: CAVIRTEX, Quadriga and Buttercoin.

We have other people from other Bitcoin projects in here. There’s quite a few companies actually working out of here right now, and then we’re still working on our accelerator program, which we’re hoping to have launched probably in the next couple of months.

But for right now I’m focusing on some new products with Kryptokit. The accelerator program will be more focused on in the next couple of months.

CT: Can you tell us what’s going on with Kryptokit right now?

AI: We just launched Rushwallet, which is an HTML5 instant Bitcoin wallet. We believe in removing the friction for people logging into systems using passwords and usernames. So with Rushwallet, you can just go to Rushwallet.com, move your mouse around to create a Bitcoin wallet, and the mouse movements actually create entropy, or randomness, on the client side, which matches with a random generator to create a Bitcoin wallet without needing any usernames or passwords.

It’s cross-browser and device-compatible, so it could be used on iPhones or Android devices, as well.

We’re soon to be announcing pictures of our new hardware wallet that’s going to be working with Kryptokit and a complete redesign of the extension and the apps coming out for iPhone and Android from Kyptokit.

CT: Canada had the first and second Bitcoin ATMs. It currently has more than any other country, according to CoinDesk’s reporting last month. Is this just a matter of Canada being a first mover, or is there a bigger takeaway here about the Canadian Bitcoin community?

AI: I think a lot had to do with BitAccess being from Ottawa, here, because most of the machines in Canada are BitAccess machines. Another six just opened up in Toronto last week. We’ve got eight in Toronto right now, which is the most of any city in the world.

So, I think it helped to have BitAcess from Canada pushing these machines out, and focusing on Canada first. Now, they’re focusing more worldwide, but I think that’s probably why there are more machines in Canada, was because of the relationship with BitAccess.


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