If you are not new to the crypto landscape, you have probably heard about Vitalik Buterin quite a few times. Vitalik Buterin was born in Russia but emigrated to Canada, and he is a man who has been involved in the Bitcoin space from the early beginning, writing articles for Bitcoin magazines. However, people know him the most as the man behind Ethereum because he is one of the co-creators of the platform. Ethereum is one of the most important blockchains worldwide, as it brought plenty of innovations in the crypto sphere, including non-fungible tokens, dApps, and decentralized applications.
Buterin has always been interested in the crypto world and how to buy crypto currency, and this is why he traveled around the world in 2013 to speak with Bitcoin developers, and from the conversations, he realized he could be able to design a better blockchain that overcomes the shortcomings of Bitcoin. In the end, he succeeded in putting his ideas into practice, as he was able to create Ethereum, one of the leading blockchains.
In this article, we will explore details from the past of the co-creator of Ethereum and how he succeeded in creating Ethereum.
Vitalik Buterin’s childhood
Vitalik Buterin was born on 31 January 1994 in Kolomna, Russia, where he lived until the age of six. After that, he moved to Canada with his parents, who were looking for better employment opportunities. When he was in the third grade at a Canadian primary school, little Vitalik was placed in a program for the gifted, where he discovered that he was different from his colleagues and even teachers, as he possessed particular talents and skills.
For example, he was predisposed to programming and math, had a strong interest in economics, which appeared at a very early stag, and was able to add three-digit numbers in his head very fast, twice as fast as his colleagues. He even said that people considered him quite a math genius. Then, Vitalik was enrolled in a private institution, Abelard School, in Toronto. This institution had a considerable impact on how Buterin perceived education, and here he developed more than ever his hunger for learning, where his main goal in life was to gain knowledge.
As an extracurricular activity, he enjoyed playing World of Warcraft. However, after Blizzard removed a special feature from the game, Buterin renounced playing the game and understood why centralized services were horrible.
The Student Life of Vitalik Buterin
When he grew, Vitalik became interested in finding a new direction in his life, and this is how he came across Bitcoin in 2011. Although at first, he was suspicious, because he couldn’t really understand how Bitcoin could be valuable if it had no physical backing, he changed his opinion soon after. From that moment, he became fascinated by Bitcoin and searched for more information about it. He also wanted to buy Bitcoin to enter the experimental economy officially, but he didn’t have the cash to buy the digital coin nor the computational power to mine BTC. So, he started to look for other solutions, and this is the way in which he began to write articles for a blog, which rewarded him with around 5 BTC per article.
His articles attracted Mihai Alisie, a Bitcoin enthusiast from Romania, who co-founded Vitalik to launch his Bitcoin Magazine in late 2011. After this event, he was traveling, writing, and working over 30 hours per week in the crypto sphere, so he decided to quit university.
He was very interested in Bitcoin, and this is why he traveled around the world to discover essential insights from Bitcoin developers. The conclusion of this was that Vitalik could create a more successful and sustainable blockchain that would have more application possibilities and would not be limited to a single use case, as it happened with Bitcoin at that time. Vitalik looked at the protocols that Bitcoin was using, and he knew that the protocols could be generalized with the help of a Turing-complete programming language. This programming language makes a computer solve every particular problem if it has the necessary memory and an appropriate algorithm.
He tried to tell developers about what he had discovered, but his proposal was refused, which led to the birth of Ethereum.
How Ethereum came to be
In late 2013, Buterin created a white paper with the idea he had and sent it to a few of his friends, who shared it even further. After seeing the white paper, people became interested in the concept, and approximately 30 individuals reached out to Vitalik to discuss it. At the very beginning, the idea of Ethereum was about a digital coin, but the vision changed, and in 2014, the team behind Ethereum figured out that decentralized file storage could be brought to life with just a small number of code lines.
The project was released to the public in January 2014, and the team consisted of Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, Gavin Wood and Joe Lublin. They decided to hold an initial coin offering (ICO) to be able to fund the development, and they raised more than 31,000 BTC, which was around $18 million at that time. Then, the Ethereum Foundation was established, a nonprofit organization with its base in Switzerland.
Ethereum was designed with several principles, including universality, simplicity, agility, modularity, non-censorship, and non-discrimination. Over the years, Ethereum has undergone several upgrades to improve its blockchain, and some of the most renowned ones are the Shanghai hard fork and the London and Berlin upgrades.
What will the future bring to Ethereum?
Buterin wants Ethereum to rule the metaverse universe in the future, where people can interact virtually in a vast online world. At the moment, Ethereum is an important blockchain that hosts Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Ethereum forever changed the crypto landscape, as it introduced concepts that were unknown until then, including smart contracts and decentralized finance.