Today we will talk about the young crypto billionaire, philanthropist and co-founder of Ethereum. You will find a short biography, interesting facts about the creation of Ethereum and the goals behind it. Let’s get started!
Childhood and youth
Vitalik Buterin was born in Kolomna, near Moscow, in 1994. In 2000, his family moved to Canada. Vitalik was far a better student than his classmates, especially in mathematics, so pretty soon he was transferred to a class for gifted children.
His father was a computer scientist, he owned a small software startup. That’s where Vitalik got his passion for technology. Dad encouraged Vitalik's interest in writing video games from the age of ten. And in 2011, his father introduced him to blockchain. From that moment Vitalik became very interested in Bitcoin. In order to own it, he began to write articles on the forum, for each of which he received 5 Bitcoin.
However, that site was closed due to lack of readers. This did not stop Vitalik Buterin. Later that same year, together with crypto enthusiast Mihai Alisi, he created the Bitcoin Magazine! It was and is a successful digital resource about blockchain technology.
Ethereum
Vitalik entered the University of Waterloo in 2012, but he dropped out after a year to work on crypto ideas. Some time later Buterin noticed that all blockchain projects are just focused on specific applications. According to him, these projects could do much more. This is how Ethereum was born.
Buterin wanted to create a universal platform without censorship and discrimination, which could not only support apps, but also give other features. Developers should be able to use it in order to create governance systems, lending platforms, databases, and more. Vitalik wrote the first Ethereum white paper when he was 19 years old. He sent it to his friends and some of them really liked his idea. Buterin expected cryptography experts to criticize his work, but it did not happen.
The project was first successfully pitched to the public at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami in 2014. Buterin gave a long speech about the future of Ethereum, which received a standing ovation at the end. From that moment on, things began to move quickly. The project was co-founded by Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio and Charles Hoskinson. They decided to work in Sweden, since this country was friendlier towards cryptocurrencies than others at that time. In July 2015 the first Ethereum block was formed.
The DAO hack
After the launch, the platform began to quickly gain popularity among startups. One of them was a blockchain project for autonomous management of investment capital The DAO. In less than two weeks after the launch of fundraising, the DAO attracted $154 million, when it had originally only hoped to raise $5 million. The money should have been invested in the development of the project, but in June something bad happened.
There was a bug in the program code. It allowed hackers to steal about one-third of the ETH. This incident damaged both the reputation of the DAO and of the Ethereum network itself. The ETH price fell by almost 50% immediately. After several weeks of discussions, a hard fork was made. Now there were two separate blockchains and two separate native tokens. The stolen funds were returned to investors.
The hard fork should’ve helped to destroy the hacked network after the update, but due to controversy, this never happened. New fork of the network is called Ethereum with the ETH token. And the other one continued to work in the original version, which is called Ethereum Classic with the ETC token.
Conclusion
Despite the fact that Vitalik is not very socially active, he is quite an interesting and kind of mysterious person. He often comes to conferences and meetups in funny (and sometimes strange) T-shirts and a watch with a pink plastic strap. He even appeared in a video with famous actors in 2021. Ashton Kutcher and his wife Mila Kunis have published a video in which Vitalik Buterin teaches newcomers about cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
Probably, after Satoshi Nakamoto, Buterin's name is the most famous in the Crypto World. He is one of the youngest and most successful developers in the crypto industry. The multimillionaire tech genius never wanted to be wealthy. Ethereum for him was and is a project that should improve people's lives. What interesting facts about Buterin or Ethereum do you know? Share with us in the comments below!
If you want to learn more interesting facts about crypto then don’t forget to check out our blog! You might like our articles “The New ETH Roadmap Section Reveal” and “How To Sell Ethereum (ETH)”.
