Who is Vitalik Buterin?
Key points
- Vitalik Buterin is a co-founder of Ethereum and the project’s public face.
- Born in Russia to programmer parents, he moved to Canada aged six, where he grew up and was educated. From childhood he was keen on software development and mathematics.
- Buterin first outlined Ethereum’s architecture in late 2013. Co-founders included Gavin Wood and Joseph Lubin.
- He remains influential in the blockchain platform’s developer community and is one of the crypto industry’s acknowledged leaders.
Where was Vitalik Buterin born and raised?
Vitaly Dmitriyevich Buterin, better known as Vitalik Buterin, was born on January 31st 1994 in Kolomna, near Moscow.
His parents, Dmitry Buterin and Natalia Amelina, are trained as programmers. They divorced in 1997. After that his mother emigrated to Canada; at the age of six he moved there with his father.
They settled in Toronto, where the future creator of Ethereum attended a school specialising in mathematics, programming and economics, and later enrolled at, and graduated from, the private Abelard School.
According to Canadian Business, it was his father who introduced Vitalik Buterin to cryptocurrencies. Both his parents now run crypto projects: Natalia at CryptoChicks and Dmitry at BlockGeeks.
What is Vitalik Buterin’s educational background?
As his father recalled, from an early age Buterin showed interest in mathematics and computer science. While still at school, he took third place at the International Olympiad in Informatics, held under the auspices of UNESCO.
In 2012 Buterin enrolled at the University of Waterloo, a leading Canadian institution for programmers. But in 2013 he was expelled. By his own account, he was deeply engaged in studying and writing blockchain code, leaving no time for his studies.
In 2018 the University of Basel awarded the Ethereum creator an honorary doctorate, calling him “a key player in the digital revolution of our time”.
What did Vitalik Buterin do before creating Ethereum?
In 2011 Buterin became a writer for the portal Bitcoin Weekly, devoted to the first cryptocurrency. His articles caught the attention of Romanian crypto enthusiast Mihai Alisie, who suggested they co-found a print magazine about cryptocurrency. Buterin agreed, becoming one of the founders of Bitcoin Magazine. He wrote nine of the first issue’s 12 articles.
After being expelled from university, Buterin also took an internship at the IT company NextThought, working on back-end development.
How did Vitalik Buterin found Ethereum?
In early 2013 Buterin embarked on an international trip, among other things to meet teams from various crypto projects. In Israel he met the creators of Mastercoin, the first “cryptocurrency 2.0” project. This proved pivotal in Buterin’s biography.
Mastercoin founder John Willett is known for conducting the first ICO in history, in 2012. In the project’s white paper he—also for the first time in cryptocurrency history—described the concept of smart contracts and several other ideas, including DAOs, algorithmic stablecoins and more.
Mastercoin was the first blockchain project to go beyond a digital currency, aiming to create a platform for applications. That concept was ultimately realised in Ethereum. Mastercoin was renamed Omni, and it was on this network that the Tether stablecoin was first issued.
In November 2013 Buterin sent the Ethereum white paper to his crypto-enthusiast friends. After a positive reception, he and some of them began to bring the project to life.
One of his closest collaborators was Gavin Wood, who in early 2014 authored the so‑called “yellow paper”, a document laying out Ethereum’s technical details. There Wood first described the platform’s virtual machine—the Ethereum Virtual Machine—which became the “heart” of the smart‑contract system. Wood later contributed to other landmark crypto projects, notably Polkadot.
Other co-founders of Ethereum include Joseph Lubin, Charles Hoskinson, Jeffrey Wilcke, Mihai Alisie, Amir Chetrit and Anthony Di Iorio.
To finance development, the Ethereum team used $100,000 that Buterin received from the Thiel Foundation, the fund of noted tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel.
In addition, in the summer of 2014 Ethereum held an ICO. The token sale raised 31,500 BTC, around $18.5m at the time. Part of the ETH issuance was allocated to the developer team and to the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, which later became the organisation supporting the ecosystem’s development.
The blockchain platform launched in 2015.
Does Buterin still help develop Ethereum?
Today the blockchain platform’s creator is one of the chairs of the Ethereum Foundation. He has authored or co-authored about 40 proposals to improve the Ethereum protocol—the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). These are discussed in the Ethereum developer community and, after refinement, implemented in the blockchain protocol via hard forks.
Buterin contributed to key proposals such as the introduction of the ERC‑20 token standard and the transition to the Proof‑of‑Stake consensus algorithm. He also works on core components of the large‑scale Ethereum 2.0 upgrade.
In 2021 he and other developers published EIP‑1559, which was included in the London hard fork. It changed the network’s fee mechanism and introduced an ETH burn mechanism.
In the winter of 2022 Buterin proposed incorporating ZK‑rollups into the fee calculation system to reduce average fees severalfold.
Buterin is also a public figure, speaks at conferences and is regarded as a leading intellectual of the blockchain industry. He comments on current affairs on Twitter. He also maintains a blog, where he publishes his reflections on various topics.
“You wake up in 2035, and 80% of transactions and savings in the world are carried out in a single currency, and it is not ETH. Which currency do you think it will be?” he wrote.
What does Vitalik Buterin write about?
On his website the Ethereum founder proposes new blockchain applications—from new systems for funding public goods to building “crypto cities”. He also criticises bitcoin’s legalisation in El Salvador, sets out the complexities of blockchain-based voting, and discusses how prediction markets affect modern politics, using US elections as an example.
His interests are not limited to cryptocurrencies and blockchain. The Ethereum creator is interested in life extension and believes that some people born today may live to 3,000 years old. He also publishes work on economics. For example, in 2018 Buterin released an article on decentralising the tax system.
In February 2022, it became known that in the autumn a collection of Vitalik Buterin’s essays would be published in the United States, titled “Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains”.
He also takes an interest in public life. Even before the war in Ukraine, Buterin urged the Russian government not to allow military action. When the war began, Buterin supported Ukraine with donations and noted:
“The situation reminded many people in the community that ultimately the purpose of cryptocurrencies is to do things that create a meaningful effect in the real world.”
How much ETH does Buterin hold?
In November 2021 Forbes recognised Buterin as the youngest crypto billionaire. The publication estimated the Ethereum founder’s wealth at more than 325,000 ether (ETH), about $1.46bn at the time.
However, after a market correction his wealth declined. In the spring of 2022 his representative said Buterin’s capital was roughly $800m. He thus dropped out of the list of crypto billionaires.
Does Buterin maintain ties with Russia?
The Ethereum creator is a Canadian citizen. For the first time since emigrating he visited Russia in 2016. He spoke at a Skolkovo Foundation conference and met representatives of the Bank of Russia, which at the time was developing the interbank blockchain platform “Masterchain” based on Ethereum.
Buterin saw great potential for the project in Russia and planned to involve Russian business and programmers.
A year later he visited Russia again and met Vladimir Putin at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum.
Later, answering a question about why he meets politicians and officials from different countries even though they represent structures that are the opposite of decentralised systems, Buterin quoted the American civil-rights campaigner Frederick Douglass:
“I will unite with anybody to do right, and with nobody to do wrong”.
After the start of hostilities in Ukraine, Buterin abandoned his previous neutrality and openly condemned the war initiated by Russia.
How much does Vitalik Buterin give to charity?
Buterin is an active philanthropist and patron. He donated $1bn to fight coronavirus in India (though part of the donation was returned to him) and $4m to the University of New South Wales, which is developing a method for early detection of pandemic signals.
The crypto entrepreneur also gave $336m to the Methuselah Foundation, which works on regenerative medicine, and donated about $5m in support of Ukraine after the war began.
In addition, Buterin supports the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MIRI, which works on AI safety, the Charter Cities Institute, which develops new kinds of cities, and the SENS Foundation, which researches life-extension technologies.
Is Buterin a crypto-industry star?
Today Vitalik Buterin is unquestionably one of the industry’s leading figures, regularly listed among the world’s most influential people. His contribution has been acknowledged by Elon Musk and Herman Gref, and crypto enthusiasts in China even call him “God V”.
Two English-language non-fiction bestsellers have already been written about Buterin and the making of Ethereum: Laura Shin’s “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” and Camila Russo’s “The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum”.
Hollywood’s interest cemented his pop‑culture status: Ridley Scott, the director of “Alien” and “Gladiator”, is producing a screen adaptation of Russo’s book.
What else to read?
What is a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation)?
What are ERC‑20 tokens?
What is Polygon (MATIC)?
What is yield farming (income farming)?
What is NEAR Protocol?
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