Jutta Steiner and
the trouble with trust

Jutta Steiner’s route into Ethereum began with a question that required no cryptocurrency to ask: what was happening to her data? After Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance, she started reading about ways to share information securely. The reading led to MaidSafe, then to online discussions of Ethereum, then to a Bitcoin meetup in Berlin where Gavin Wood was speaking. A few clicks had become an appointment. A mathematician had found a different sort of problem.

She placed that first involvement around May 2014. Ethereum was still being built. Bitcoin had interested her mathematically, but Ethereum offered something she found more compelling: a programmable system with uses beyond transferring money. Here was a possible way to reconsider the arrangements underneath everyday online life. The attraction was practical and political as well as technical. Who operated the service? Who controlled its rules? How much did the person using it have to accept on faith?

The setting matters. This was a meetup, an accessible place to ask questions, rather than the final stop on a carefully plotted executive itinerary. Steiner had completed a doctorate and worked in consulting. She arrived with experience, curiosity and a concern she wanted to follow. The internet had supplied both the problem and directions to the people attempting an answer.

Before the blockchain, a concertina

Her earlier work dealt with patterns that had little interest in anybody’s wallet. At the University of Bonn, Steiner researched the concertina pattern: a configuration of magnetization in thin, elongated pieces of material. A 2011 paper bearing her name alongside four collaborators combined mathematical analysis, numerical simulation and experimental observations to investigate how the pattern forms and changes. Felix Otto, her doctoral adviser, was among the authors.

The title sounds almost musical. The work was decidedly mathematical. It concerned the relationship between a model and something observable, including the spacing of the pattern and the way it coarsened. Bonn’s Institute for Numerical Simulation lists her doctoral work among its 2011 student awards. Long before a conference badge said Parity, there was a sustained piece of research with a specific physical question to answer.

Later, explaining her background, Steiner described studying mathematical physics and enjoying abstract concepts with a tangible connection to the world. Blockchain extended that interest into coordination between people. Mathematics could be constructive: a means of designing arrangements, rather than simply analysing them. The subject had changed from magnetic materials to human agreements. The appeal of giving an abstract idea a working form remained.

The launch date could wait

By late 2014, Steiner was managing Ethereum’s security audit. It was work with an unglamorous requirement: find trouble before strangers did. In March 2015, she described selecting outside specialists with Gustav Simonsson, bringing together security practitioners, academics and blockchain expertise. The bug bounty programme invited the wider community to participate, too. People who discovered vulnerabilities were contributing to the launch by showing why parts of the software needed more work.

She explained that resolving the issues would require however much time the work demanded. It is a wonderfully inconvenient position for anyone holding a launch calendar. Yet the reasoning was clear. A discovery was useful only if the team followed it through, corrected the problem and tested the correction. Declaring an issue closed was a responsibility, not a clerical flourish.

Her July account set out several layers of inspection: scrutiny of protocols and incentives, reviews of implementations, and the public bounty effort. Security extended beyond whether one programmer had made a mistake. The economics of the network and the way separate pieces behaved together also needed examination. Steiner’s role put her at the junction between a research project and the people who would soon rely on it.

“Working through all issues will take the time it takes.”

Jutta Steiner · March 2015

A warning is part of the product

The work continued after launch. In August 2015, a security notice under Steiner’s name warned users of a Windows client about missing underlying keys. The notice identified who was affected, which actions to avoid, and the version containing a fix. It was the opposite of a sweeping manifesto. It told people what they needed to do next.

Another August advisory addressed users exposing an interface to the internet while leaving accounts unlocked. Here the difficulty involved configuration and behaviour as well as software. A feature that was safe under its defaults could become dangerous when deployed differently. The distinction would recur in Steiner’s later teaching: security involves the people operating a system and the procedures around it.

These alerts provide a useful view of early Ethereum from the maintenance desk. An open network still needed someone to explain a failure plainly, coordinate repairs and help users protect themselves. A decentralised system did not make responsibility disappear. It distributed work, and much of that work remained quite human. There was no shortage of things to do once the launch celebrations were over.

First, find out where the product came from

Steiner’s interest in using Ethereum also connected her with Jessi Baker and Provenance, the supply-chain transparency company she helped co-found. The question there was familiar to anyone reading a product label: what can the buyer actually know about the history behind it? The people, processes and claims attached to a physical object could be difficult to inspect.

In December 2015, Steiner published a supply-chain prototype explanation co-authored with Wood. It put her interest in trust into an ordinary commercial setting. A product passes through several hands. Information has to pass with it, and the next participant needs some reason to believe the record. A shared digital history was one proposed way to make those handovers easier to examine.

Provenance’s subsequent Indonesian tuna pilot makes the idea concrete. Fishermen registered catches using text messages; digital records accompanied the fish through parts of the supply chain. Local organisations still verified claims at the point of origin. The fish, admirably indifferent to database architecture, still required people to establish what had happened. The experiment showed both the usefulness of a common record and the importance of the work required to create it.

Building underneath the applications

Parity grew out of a frustration Steiner described openly: the underlying technology had further to go before it could support mainstream use. The company began as EthCore in late 2015. Its initial founders were Steiner, Wood, Aeron Buchanan, TJ Saw and Ken Kappler. Björn Wagner joined as a co-founder the following year. Steiner became its first chief executive.

The company’s early work included an Ethereum client written in Rust. A client is software that lets a computer participate in the network: infrastructure beneath the applications most users encounter. Later, Parity’s work expanded into Polkadot and Substrate. The former was designed to connect different blockchains; the latter gave developers components for building their own. They addressed the expense and difficulty of repeatedly constructing the foundations.

These choices fit the concern Steiner had brought to Ethereum. A useful application needs an environment that can sustain it. Separate networks need ways to communicate. Developers need building materials they can adapt. The people at the end of the chain need a service they can use without becoming specialists in every layer underneath it. Infrastructure is a peculiar product: when it works comfortably, much of the achievement becomes invisible.

The cost of getting it wrong

That ambition acquired a painful counterweight in 2017, when Parity’s wallet software suffered separate incidents involving stolen and frozen ether. They belong in the account of the company Steiner led. An organisation working on security and decentralisation had also produced software whose failures left users facing serious consequences. The distance between an intention and an outcome could be measured in inaccessible funds.

In their 2018 public response, Steiner and Wood described retiring the multisignature wallet and revising how they developed smart contracts. The changes included stricter testing, deployment procedures and outside audits. These were specific process changes, open to examination. A statement of commitment could explain the direction; the engineering practices would have to carry it.

The frozen funds also raised questions about governance. If repairing a mistake required changes to a shared network, who should agree, and on what terms? In a 2019 conversation with Laura Shin, Steiner and Wood discussed that dispute alongside Polkadot and Substrate. The social arrangements around software had become inseparable from the software itself. For Steiner, coordination was now a problem experienced at close quarters.

Learning beyond the job title

Her 2020 Crypto Startup School session returned to security as an organisational discipline. She discussed code vulnerabilities alongside operational procedures and the management of an application over time. Deploying smart contracts creates dependencies and consequences that can be difficult to reverse. Teams need several forms of protection, with attention to how they combine. A successful review is one part of an ongoing practice.

Her comments about learning offer another, less technical perspective. Looking back at university, she recalled how some male classmates had arrived with more prior support and preparation. She also remembered the value of having a female mathematics professor. She had coded during her studies, then added online courses and extensive reading when moving into new territory. Expertise, in this account, involved continuing to learn rather than waiting for a perfectly matching qualification.

Steiner later left Parity’s chief executive role. By November 2021, her departure was public. The title belongs to a completed chapter, while the company she helped establish continued developing its infrastructure. In its September 2025 anniversary account, Parity placed Steiner and Wood at the beginning of that history. The research, the audits, the applications and the difficult repairs all sit behind the familiar shorthand of co-founder.

Her stated ambition was a web in which users had more control and fewer hidden dependencies. That remains a demanding standard for any technology claiming to serve them. Following her path makes the ambition unusually concrete: read widely, go to the meetup, examine the machinery, publish the warning. Trust is an appealing word on a conference stage. Making a system worthy of it supplies enough work for the rest of the week.