Vitalik Buterin: The Ethereum Blockchain Pioneer

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian computer programmer born in January 1994 who heads and co-founded Ethereum. 

Buterin learned about cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding Bitcoin Magazine in 2011, where he wrote articles about blockchain technology and Bitcoin for the magazine.

Buterin traveled worldwide for six months in 2013 to speak with Bitcoin developers. He understood he could build a new and widely applicable version of the Bitcoin blockchain. 

He aimed to improve the Bitcoin blockchain system’s strength by making it more general-purpose and compatible with blockchain networks and calling it Ethereum.Buterin co-founded Ethereum, the pioneer decentralized application blockchain, including decentralized applications to run on the Ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts are also part of his accomplishments.

Vitalik Buterin became the world’s youngest billionaire at 27. It’s worth noting that Vitalik Buterin’s net worth changes due to the crypto market’s volatility: in May 2021, when Ethereum’s price exceeded $3,000 for the first time to create a new all-time-high, Buterin’s wealth exceeded $1 billion, making him the youngest crypto billionaire at that time.

Although, most estimates believe the Ethereum founder is no longer a billionaire due to the year-long bear market. Vitalik Buterin’s net worth in 2023 is estimated to be around $400 million based on his $ETH holdings. 

Our estimates also do not include any off-chain assets that Vitalik may likely have.

He likely has other sources of wealth, but most analysts don’t believe they’d amount to enough to impact his net worth significantly. 

Although he occasionally sells Ethereum, for example, in August 2023, he moved $1 million worth of Ethereum to a centralized exchange; he’s still one of the biggest Ethereum whales.

So, even though Vitalik Buterin has lost a considerable amount of his net worth during the year-long bear market, he’s also likely to recover it quickly when the next bull run comes.

While there’s no official record, numerous sources say Vitalik Buterin’s IQ is 257. Any score above 130 on standardized tests constitutes a high IQ, so almost twice that number, Buterin’s score is unusually high.

Vitalik Buterin has publicly disclosed that he is on the autism spectrum. Many people have speculated that his skinny appearance is a result of a sickness, but Vitalik Buterin has never claimed to be sick but could be autistic.

Vitalik’s love for decentralization sprang up from his experience playing his favorite game, World of Warcraft, in 2010. 

In Vitalik’s words, 

“I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell“.

Vitalik logged into his account and found that the game developers had seriously downgraded his most valuable player.

He virtually cried to bed that night, discovering the horrors of centralized organizations. This inspired him to think big about decentralization.

In 2011 while searching for a new purpose in life, Vitalik was introduced to Bitcoin. At first, he was skeptical about this new technology but gradually it became interesting.

He often waited for a weekly blog called Bitcoin Weekly to learn more about Bitcoin.

Soon, he learnt more about blockchain technology which set the foundation to build Ethereum.

In 2013, Buterin wrote his idea of Ethereum in a white paper, which he sent to his friends, who shared it to more people. About 30 guys contacted Buterin to discuss the concept of Ethereum. 

Initially, Ethereum was still very much about digital currency, just like Bitcoin. But the vision metamorphosed into the decentralized application (Dapps) pioneer it is today. 

By the end of January 2014, Buterin and his team had realized that they could fashion their ideas to create decentralized file storage, and concepts like name registry could become a reality. 

Ethereum went live in January 2014, with the main team consisting of Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Alisie, Joe Lubin, Charles Hoskinson, and Gavin Wood. 

Buterin also unveiled Ethereum on stage at a Bitcoin conference in Miami.

On July 22, 2014, the team decided to hold an initial coin offering (ICO) for ETH, the Ethereum network’s native token, to fund the development. 

The ICO concluded on September 2, 2014, lasting 42 days. Around the same time, Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship grant of $100,000, which he committed to further developing Ethereum.

The Ethereum team raised over 31,000 BTC from the Ether ICO, or around $18 million. The team moved to establish the Ethereum Foundation further, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland tasked with supporting Ethereum’s open-source software development. 

Buterin believes Ethereum will rule the metaverse in 10 years. 

The metaverse is a concept of a vast virtual world where users can interact with each other and with digital assets and objects such as avatars.

According to Buterin, Ethereum is poised to be a fundamental part of the metaverse. He also believes that the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) ecosystem will provide Web3 usernames for crypto addresses, decentralized websites, and the concept of people and items having cross-platform identities. 

Buterin is most intrigued by the zk-SNARKS (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge), a cryptographic proof that permits one party to establish that it has a particular information without revealing it. It primarily eliminates the need for interaction between the prover and the verifier. 

On a recent Twitter Space on July 6th, Vitalk Buterin highlighted the slow transaction speed of Bitcoin, and if Bitcoin needs to become more than just a payment system, it needs to be scaled.

He emphasized strongly the need for faster transactions as the world continues to embrace cryptocurrencies and suggested that scaling Bitcoin with solutions like zk-rollups or Plasma will enable Bitcoin to become more than just a payment system.