Vitaliy Buterin

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of the blockchain platform and digital currency Ethereum. He is the youngest crypto billionaire in the world according to Forbes.

Buterin was named one of the most famous new billionaires by Forbes USA in 2021. He speaks Russian, English and Chinese. He lived for three years in Zug, Switzerland, and moved to Singapore in 2017.

He was born on January 31, 1994 in Kolomna, Russia. When the future programmer was six years old, his family emigrated to Canada. He went to school in Toronto. Buterin was fond of math, programming, and economics, and in the third grade he was transferred to a class for gifted children at the private Abelard School.

Vitaliy’s father, a computer science specialist, has been encouraging his son’s passion for writing video games since he was ten years old. He also introduced Buterin to the ideas of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. At first, the idea of bitcoin as a currency with no intrinsic value seemed doomed to failure to Vitalik. But when he learned more about bitcoin, he wanted to be part of this wave. However, at the time of Buterin, he had neither the money nor the technical means to mine cryptocurrency.After graduating from high school, Buterin entered Waterloo State University, a public research university. There, he simultaneously attended five advanced training courses and worked part-time as a research assistant to cryptographer Jan Goldberg, one of the creators of the Off-the-Record Messaging cryptographic protocol and former chairman of the board of directors of the Tor Project, a research and education organization.

In 2012, Vitalik Buterin took third place at the International Computer Science Olympiad. In May 2013, he traveled to San Jose, California, to attend a conference of bitcoiners from around the world. There, he got acquainted with new hardware wallets, merchant payment platforms, and bitcoin ATMs. According to Buterin, this convinced him that cryptocurrency is already a reality, and therefore worth the risk.

In 2013, he traveled the world. In six months, he visited Israel, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Las Vegas. Buterin met with people who wanted to develop a better version of bitcoin and tried to create an additional layer over BTC to add functionality to this cryptocurrency.

Over time, he realized that they were using a «Swiss knife» approach: they were supporting fifteen different very limited functions. Buterin realized that if he wrote a version of Bitcoin in a more modern programming language, the system would be able to provide all possible digital services.

In 2014, Buterin received a $ 100,000 grant from the Thiel Fellowship. This organization awards scholarships to students under the age of 23 who can engage in scientific research, create a startup, or devote themselves to social activities. Vitalik immediately quit his studies and started working on Ethereum.

In 2017, Buterin was named one of Fortune magazine’s «40 Most Influential Young People Under 40» and was included in Forbes magazine’s «30 Under 30» list in the Finance category. On November 30, 2018, Vitalik Buterin received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel.

Bitcoin Magazine

In 2011, Buterin started writing for Bitcoin Weekly magazine, where he received five bitcoins per article. Mihai Alisi, a bitcoin enthusiast from Romania, became interested in Vitalik’s work and offered him to create a magazine. That’s how they became the founders of the printed Bitcoin Magazine.

The first paper issue was published in May 2012. Then Buterin and Alicea, with the support of Coin Publishing LLC, published 22 more issues. In total, the guy wrote 400 articles and notes for the magazine.

Ethereum

In November 2013, Buterin wrote and sent to fifteen friends a so-called «white paper» — a formal written communication in which he formulated the idea of Ethereum.

The word Ethereum means «ether». The founder chose this name for a reason. The aether is a hypothetical all-pervading medium in which light travels. According to the BitcoinWiki, Vitalik decided that this word was the best fit for the name of the new cryptocurrency.

After the white paper was sent out, Buterin was still afraid of criticism of Ethereum. Nevertheless, on January 26, 2014, in Miami at the North American Bitcoin Conference, Buterin presented his own cryptocurrency, which aroused considerable interest among the public. At that time, he was only 19 years old.

Vitalik Buterin and his team.

Ethereum was co-founded by Michael Alice. The company’s office is located in Zug, Switzerland.

Ethereum is a cryptocurrency and a platform for creating decentralized online services based on the blockchain that work through smart contracts. The cryptocurrency was launched on July 30, 2015. On December 1, 2020, Ethereum 2.0 was launched for the first time.

In December 2021, Ethereum’s capitalization amounted to $ 488 billion and was in second place after Bitcoin with a market value of $ 966 billion.

However, since the end of May this year, Buterin has ceased to be a dollar millionaire. Since the beginning of the year, the value of the second cryptocurrency has fallen along with all the others.

Family (parents):

• Dmytro Buterin is an entrepreneur, programmer, founder of Wild Apricot IT company and BlockGeeksLab, a company that launches and invests in blockchain startups. He was born and raised in Grozny, Russia.
• Natalia Amelina is a co-founder of the educational non-profit organization CryptoChicks, which was established in 2017. She runs blockchain literacy programs around the world.