The founder of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin
After discovering cryptocurrencies while still at school, Vitalik Buterin dropped out of university to travel the world and explore crypto projects. He then realised he could take the blockchain technology far beyond financial applications.
Vitalik Buterin
‘I went around the world, explored many crypto projects, and finally realised that they were all too concerned about specific applications and not being sufficiently general – hence the birth of Ethereum, which has been taking up my life ever since.’ – Vitalik Buterin
Born in Russia in 1994, he emigrated to Toronto in Canada in 2000 with his parents Dmitry Buterin, a computer scientist, and Natalia Ameline. Subsequent to quitting his hobby of playing the hugely popular online multiplayer role-playing game, World of Warcraft, after realising ‘what horrors centralised services can bring’, the 17-year old schoolboy started to search for a new purpose in life in 2011.
Vitalik Buterin’s CV
2012: graduated from The Aberlard School, a Toronto-based private school
— Grade 11: placed in top Honour Roll category for the Canadian Computing Competition, Junior division
— Grade 12: won bronze at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Italy
2012 – 2013: studied and dropped out of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo
July 2012 – August 2012: internship as a developer at NextThought LLC, programming python server side code for technology-assisted education software
2011 – 2014: co-founded Bitcoin Magazine with Mihai Alisie
November 2013 – present: founded Ethereum with other developers
Discovering bitcoin
‘At first, I was sceptical, and did not understand how it could possibly have value without physical backing. But slowly I became more and more interested.’ – Vitalik Buterin
This led to his discovery of bitcoin, which gradually introduced him to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology underpinning it. After launching a blog named Bitcoin Weekly in 2011, he soon teamed up with Mihai Alisie to create the first publication devoted exclusively to the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Magazine, publishing the first issue in May 2012.
What are cryptocurrencies?
Alisie, who graduated with a licentiate degree in Cybernetics, Economy Informatics and Statistics in 2010, was the editor-in-chief of the publication until late 2013, when he, and others, assisted Buterin in founding the Ethereum project. Buterin continued to contribute articles until leaving in 2014.
University dropout
Buterin soon found himself working over 30 hours a week on crypto projects and decided to drop out of university in 2013, only a year after joining. He then started to travel the world and study what the existing blockchain technology and applications had to offer.
Visiting Israel in October 2013, Buterin ended up spending time with a team developing one of the first ‘crypto 2.0’ projects, Mastercoin, which aimed to take blockchain technology beyond digital currency.
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