Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian developer who co-founded Ethereum in 2014 at the age of 20, alongside co-founders Gavin Wood and Joseph Lubin, making him one of the richest, youngest and influential people in the cryptocurrency economy.

Since then, Buterin has been involved in sizeable donations to further development of the blockchain technology and was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Basel for his contribution to the cryptocurrency space.

Vitalik Buterin: His background and the creation of Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin co-founded Ethereum in 2014, intending to improve on the shortcoming of the Bitcoin blockchain. He believed its native scripting language limited the use of blockchain technology beyond a payment solution and set out to create a blockchain company that supports the development of decentralized applications (dApps). Vitalik dropped out of the University of Waterloo shortly after being awarded a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship grant for innovators under 23. Prior to Ethereum, Vitalik co-founded Bitcoin Magazine alongside fellow Ethereum co-founder – Mihai Alisie.

Vitalik wrote the white paper for Ethereum and shared it with close friends and acquaintances. The idea quickly generated traction in the crypto community, and he presented it at a Miami Bitcoin forum in 2014. His idea represented what is now known today as Ethereum – a blockchain-based platform that facilitates the creation of other altcoins and supports programmable smart contracts.

Dubbed Ethereum 2.0, Vitalik and his team of co-founders have set out to create a more scalable Ethereum solution by gradually migrating from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) to the Proof-of-Stake(PoS) blockchain protocol. Vitalik reportedly invested about $1.4 million to kick off this project.

Given the track record of Vitalik and his team of co-founders, the project is tipped to be successful. The Ethereum company currently has a market valuation of $400 billion as of May, 2021.