Vitalik Buterin has managed to design a revolutionary layer of blockchain technology with the help of smart contracts. In 2014, at the age of 20, Buterin introduced Ethereum on stage at a Bitcoin conference in Miami. This journey turned into a $400 billion ecosystem, and just 7 years after that day, Forbes named him the youngest crypto billionaire in the world.
Who is Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum?
He was born in 1994 in the town of Kolomna, on the outskirts of Moscow. Together with his father Dmitry Buterin and mother Natalia Amelli, they moved to Canada when Vitalik was 6 years old due to better working conditions. Vitalik, whose father was a computer scientist, had a natural talent for mathematics and programming and developed a serious interest in economics at a very early age. He was always a child who attracted the attention of his family and environment with his intelligence. He could collect three-digit numbers from his head at twice the speed of his peers. As such, he was separated from his class and primary school 3. She participated in a special program for talented children in the classroom. Although this program meant more learning chances for him, it set him apart from his peers and made him an introvert. He also spent all his time with the computer and playing computer games. In the process, he built most of his professional and personal relationships online, and continued to develop his skills. Hungry for learning and development, Buterin spent 4 years at a private high school in Toronto that he would describe as the most interesting and productive years of his life. Here, his perspective on education changed and he made learning his first priority in life. Another thing that we could count among his priorities was World of Warcraft, a computer game. He spent a lot of time on this game until the update to his character in the game. Vitalik was ruined after this update. This point was actually a serious turning point in their belief in authority and self-government.
How Old Is the Ethereum Founder?
Vitaly Dmitriyevich “Vitalik” Buterin is a Russian-Canadian computer programmer best known as the founder of Ethereum. He was born on January 31, 1994. In 2011, he entered the world of Crypto Money as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. Today, the founder of Ethereum is 27 years old.
How Did He Meet Cryptocurrency?
When the year showed 2011, he was introduced to Bitcoin thanks to his father, a Bitcoin investor. After a few observations that he initially thought would have no long-term value, he did research on this topic, became actively involved in the forum sites, and began to realize the limitless potential of the technology behind Bitcoin as he began to engage with the community.
He wanted to formally participate in this new and experiential economy, but he had neither a computer powerful enough to mine coins nor the money to buy it. He also looked for places to pay with Bitcoin for work on various forums, and when he started writing articles for a blog, he was earning an average of 5 Bitcoins per post, and the value of Bitcoin at that time was only 80 cents. He bought a T-shirt for some of the 20 Bitcoins he had saved and became more interested in this system. During this period, he was interested in all the different economic, technological and political aspects of cryptocurrency. Through his work and writings on the forum, Buterin became more experienced with Bitcoin and as a result, became known in the community. During this period, his articles caught the attention of Mihai Alisie, a Bitcoin enthusiast from Romania, and as a result of the correspondence of the two, they founded Bitcoin Magazine together in 2011. He spent so much time writing here that he dropped out of college during this period and spent all the Bitcoins he had saved to travel the world and attend various conferences. And in this way, he was meeting people who wanted to increase the capacity of the Bitcoin network and upgrade it to a larger, more competent version. After 2 years of development, development and learning, he visited Israel in October 2013. During this period, he met the people behind the “CovertsCoins” and “MasterCoin” projects. These projects were experimenting with the use of blockchain in a variety of other applications. For example; Creating tokens over Bitcoin, enabling users to use financial contracts, and so on.
They were using Bitcoin’s blockchain, but at the same time adding new features to Bitcoin transactions. After looking at the protocols the projects were using, Buterin realized that he could generalize by replacing them with a full Turing programming language, and he presented his idea to existing projects without waiting, of course, but everyone told him that while it was an interesting idea, it was not the right time for such a big project. On top of that, Buterin decided to do it himself with determination and self-confidence. By the way, in 2013, Buterin originally wanted to prepare the infrastructure for the Ripple protocol, but at that time, Ripple was a company that had only existed for 9 months. Vitalik learned that the company must be at least 1 year in existence for America to issue this type of visa. So he went to Europe.
The Launch of Ethereum
In January 2014, the project was announced with a core team of 6 people, including Alicia and Buterin. The team introduced Etherem at the Bitcoin conference in Miami, and a few months later put Ethereum up for sale to fund the development as well. Vitalik himself received $100,000 from a Thiel Fellowship grant. Approximately $18 million worth of Bitcoin was collected in the mass sale where Ethereum was sold for Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin, which was worth $ 650 during the mass sale, lost value after and the team suffered millions of dollars in losses. With the money remaining, though, the Ethereum team founded the Ethereum Foundation in Switzerland, which is responsible for the development of Ethereum’s open-source software.
Of course, behind the scenes, there were countless technological developments, efforts and determinations. At this point, Ethereum had made a strong entry into the cryptocurrency market, the major cryptocurrency exchanges were starting to trade Ethereum one after another, and Ethereum was also rapidly gaining value. Although it was only the first product release, large companies such as Microsoft and IBM were running projects on the Ethereum platform, communicating with Vitalik and his team to work together. Today, Ethereum’s market capitalization is approximately $350 billion. Vitalik continues to add to his fortune.
What does Vitalik say?
Even though he was the founder of a structure with a value of over $ 350 billion, he was always aware that there were various problems on the market and investor side. Vitalik made various speeches and tweets in order to raise awareness of people in the crypto money ecosystem. These tweets were often critical of the greedy investor profile for human psychology and blockchain technologies. In 2017, Vitalik said, “These people don’t understand the purpose of the cryptocurrency market. While we can initiate a positive change for humanity, many people are just looking to make money the easy way,” he explains, adding that when we come to 2018, crypto coins are still new and can be very volatile, that is, a money that you do not want to lose, or that money should not be invested here with empty hopes.
Today Vitalik Buterin is 27 years old. There’s no specific place where he lives, but he said his favorites include Toronto, Singapore and Berlin. He is also very optimistic about the future of the platform, saying that Ethereum’s only killer is Ethereum. We know that mining will end with the transition to Ethereum 2.0, it will be a green network with less energy used along with PoS consensus. Buterin and his team are working to release newer, more stable, secure, and effective versions of Ethereum; The most important goals are scalability, optimization, cost-effectiveness, and security.
