Who is Vitalik Buterin?

Co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain project and the youngest crypto billionaire. What you need to know about the programmer who made a lot of money with the second most popular cryptocurrency.

How Did Vitalik Buterin Create Ethereum?

Buterin went on a trip around the world at the beginning of 2013 to meet the people working on different crypto projects. In Israel, he met with the people who made Mastercoin, which was the first project to use “cryptocurrency 2.0.” This turned out to be a turning point in Buterin’s life.

John Willet, who started Mastercoin, is known for holding the first ICO in 2012. In the project’s white paper, he explained smart contracts for the first time in the history of cryptocurrencies. He also talked about DAO, algorithmic stablecoins, and other ideas for the first time.

Mastercoin was the first blockchain project that wanted to make more than just a digital currency. It wanted to make a platform for apps. But Ethereum has already put this idea into place. Mastercoin was changed to Omni, and Tether was released for the first time on this network.

Buterin sent a white paper about Ethereum to his fellow crypto fans in November 2013. After getting positive feedback on the document, he started working on the project with some of them.

Gavin Wood, one of his closest friends, wrote the so-called “yellow paper” about Ethereum in early 2014, which explains how it works. The Ethereum Virtual Machine, which became the “heart” of the smart contract system, was first described by Wood in the same place. Later, Wood worked on other well-known crypto projects, like Polkadot.

Joseph Lubin, Charles Hoskinson, Jeffrey Wilk, Mihai Alisi, Amir Chetrit, and Anthony Di Iorio are some of the other people who helped start Ethereum.

The Ethereum team used the $100,000 that Buterin got from the foundation of well-known tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel to pay for the development.

Also, Ethereum held an ICO in the summer of 2014. Because of the token sale, they were able to get 31,500 BTC, which at the time was worth about $18.5 million. Part of the ETH was sent to the development team and the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, which later became an organization for the development of the ecosystem.

In 2015, the blockchain platform went online.

Does Buterin have a hand in making Ethereum?

One of the chairs of the Ethereum Foundation is the person who made the blockchain platform. About 40 proposals to improve the Ethereum protocol, called Ethereum Improvement Proposals, were written by him or with his help (EIP). They are talked about in the Ethereum developer community, and when they are ready, hard forks are used to add them to the blockchain protocol.

Vitalik Buterin has helped come up with important ideas, such as the ERC-20 token standard and the switch to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. He is also working on parts of the big Ethereum 2.0 update that are very important.

Together with other developers, he put out EIP-1559 in 2021, which was part of the London hard fork. Because of this, the way network commissions are calculated has changed, and a way to burn ETH has been added.

Buterin suggested adding ZK-Rollups to the system for figuring out commissions in the winter of 2022. This would cut the average size of commissions by several times.

Buterin is also a well-known person who speaks at conferences and is known as an expert in the blockchain industry. On his Twitter, he talks about what’s going on. Buterin also has a blog where he writes about his thoughts on different topics.

What is Buterin’s ETH balance?

Forbes magazine said that Buterin was the youngest crypto billionaire in November 2021. According to the article, the founder of Ethereum had more than 325,000 ether (ETH) coins at the time, which was worth about $1.46 billion at the time.

Buterin’s wealth has gone down because the cryptocurrency market has gone down. In the spring of 2022, his representative said that Buterin has about $800 million in capital. So, he fell off the list of people who are worth a billion dollars in cryptocurrency.

Buterin: the biggest name in the crypto business?

Vitalik Buterin is now one of the most important people in the crypto industry. He is often listed among the most powerful people on the planet. Elon Musk and German Gref both praised Buterin’s work, and people in China who are interested in cryptocurrencies call him “God B.”

“The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” by Laura Shin and “The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum” by Camille Russo are two best-selling nonfiction books about Buterin and the creation of Ethereum.

Ridley Scott, who directed “Alien” and “Gladiator,” is making a movie based on Russo’s book. This was the last piece of evidence that Buterin was a well-known figure in pop culture.