Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin is the Cofounder and Inventor of Ethereum and Cofounder of Bitcoin Magazine. He is a Computer Programmer who became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception.
In 2015, Vitalik deployed the Ethereum blockchain with Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin, and our Charles Hoskinson and Anthony Di Iorio. The Ethereum blockchain is described as a “decentralised mining network and software development platform rolled into one” that facilitates the creation of new cryptocurrencies and programs that share a single blockchain. Read The Prophets of Cryptocurrency Survey the Boom and Bust.
Vitalik was born in Russia and raised in Canada, where his parents emigrated when he was six. He attended The Abelard School, a private high school in Toronto. At the age of 17, Vitalik learned about Bitcoin from his father.
After high school, Vitalik attended the University of Waterloo. There, he took advanced courses and was a Research Assistant for cryptographer Ian Goldberg, who co-created Off-the-Record Messaging and was the former board of directors’ chairman of the Tor Project. In 2012, Vitalik won a bronze medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics in Italy. Read The Uncanny Mind That Built Ethereum.
Vitalik has been a member of the Bitcoin community since March 2011, when he began writing for the publication Bitcoin Weekly. The site was shut down due to insufficient revenue, and at the end of 2011, he cofounded and became the lead writer at Bitcoin Magazine.
Vitalik developed the Bitcoin private key secret sharing application btckeysplit, the pybitcointools library, and some code for the BitcoinX “colored coins” project, as well as a few others. He contributed to DarkWallet by Cody Wilson, Bitcoin Python libraries, and the cryptocurrency marketplace site Egora.
In 2013, Vitalik traveled to San Jose, California, for a conference that would change everything. He then visited developers in other countries who shared his enthusiasm for code. For the next six months, he traveled around the world to Israel, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Las Vegas, visiting the people who were working on Bitcoin and trying to make more out of it.
He returned to Toronto later that year, and within a month, he published a white paper, A Next Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform, proposing Ethereum. He dropped out of university in 2014 when he was awarded a grant of US$100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship, a scholarship created by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and went to work on Ethereum full-time.
Read Why a 20-year-old Toronto drop-out accepted $100,000 to stay out of school. Watch Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on good and bad ways to deal with crypto and Spore’s approach. Read The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum.
The Ethereum white paper was circulated, and interest grew in the new protocol in late 2013 and early 2014. Vitalik announced Ethereum more publicly at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami on 26 January. He delivered a 25-minute speech, describing the general-purpose global computer operating on a decentralized permissionless network, ending with potential uses for Ethereum that ranged from crop insurance to decentralized exchanges to DAOs. Read Out in the Open: Teenage Hacker Transforms Web Into One Giant Bitcoin Network.
Vitalik has stated that he was driven to create decentralized money because his World of Warcraft character was nerfed, specifically by patch 3.1.0, when he realized what horrors centralized services can bring. Read NFT mastermind says he created Ethereum because Warcraft nerfed his character.
Outside of the Bitcoin world, Vitalik wrote AI Challenges, a set of problems inspired by Sebastian Thrun’s course to help you learn AI programming.
In 2021, Vitalik donated $665 million to the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that, amongst other things, seeks to mitigate the existential risk from artificial intelligence. Vitalik worries that AI could become the new dominant species on Earth and may “end humanity for good”. Read The little-known AI group that got $660 million.
In 2018, Vitalik came into contact with economist Glen Weyl after tweeting about Weyl’s proposal for a new wealth tax. The two then wrote a manifesto, Liberation Through Radical Decentralization, highlighting the common ground between Vitalik’s work on cryptocurrencies and Weyl’s work on market-based solutions to social problems. Collaborating with Zoe Hitzig, a PhD student at Harvard, they published a paper in 2019 entitled A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods.
The paper sets out a method for the optimal provision of public goods using a version of quadratic voting. As of August 2022, quadratic funding had been used to allocate over $20 million to open-source software projects, primarily through Gitcoin Grants. Read This economist wants to abolish private property using blockchain.
On November 30, 2018, Buterin received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel’s Faculty of Business and Economics. Read Vitalik Buterin receives Honorary Doctorate.
Since 2014, when Vitalik received his first Fellowship, he was awarded the World Technology Award in the IT Software category (2014), Fortune 40 under 40 list (2016), Forbes 30 under 30 list (2018), Fortune the ledger 40 under 40 list (2018), and Time 100 (2021). Read Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin joins Joe Biden and Billie Eilish on Time’s 100 most influential people list.
Vitalik has donated $763,970 of Ether to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2017, $2.4 million of Ether to the SENS Research Foundation in 2018 for the research on rejuvenation biotechnologies and human life extension, and $50,000 to the SENS Research Foundation in 2020.
He also donated $1.14 billion USD worth of SHIBA coins, which had previously been gifted to him, to India’s Crypto Covid relief fund in 2021. In May 2021, Vitalik donated $336 million worth of Dogelon Mars ($ELON), previously gifted to him, to the Methuselah Foundation, which focuses on extending the human lifespan.
Vitalik also spoke out in support of Ukraine amid its invasion by Russia in 2022. On the first day of the invasion, he tweeted that “Ethereum is neutral, but I am not” and that the attack was a crime against both the Ukrainian and the Russian peoples.
He has donated crypto to projects supporting the country and endorsed projects helping Ukraine through “cryptophilanthropy”. These include Ukraine DAO, where his father Dmitry is a key-holder on its multi-signature crypto safe.
Read Binance Announces $10 Million Donation to Ukraine: Ethereum Creator Vitalik Announces UkraineDAO and Ethereum’s Russian-born cofounder has been quietly supporting a DAO that raised $8 million in crypto for Ukraine. His dad is even more involved.
The documentary, Vitalik: An Ethereum Story, was released in 2024. It chronicles tech visionary Vitalik and Ethereum’s builders community as they fight for an open, accessible internet. Watch the Official Trailer.
In 2022, he authored and published his book Vitalik Buterin. Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains.
Watch “I Lost $60 Million in One Day..” How Vitalik Buterin Created Ethereum at 19.
Watch Ethereum in 30 minutes by Vitalik Buterin | Devcon SEA, Vitalik Buterin — What Excites Me About the Next Decade — TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024, and Vitalik Buterin & Kartik Talwar I Ethereum’s Impact and Future I ETHGlobal Bangkok 2024.
Read AI as the engine, humans as the steering wheel, My techno-optimism, and The Revenue-Evil Curve: a different way to think about prioritizing public goods funding.
Read The Uncanny Mind That Built Ethereum, and Hoax Over ‘Dead’ Ethereum Founder Spurs $4 Billion Wipe Out. Read his Contributions on Medium.
Visit his Homepage and LinkedIn profile. Follow him on his Facebook Group, GitHub, Instagram, and Twitter.