Everything You Need to Know About Vitalik Buterin

Over the next week or so, we’re going to bring you a “Everything you need to know” series that will take a look at individuals and organizations that stand out in the industry for one reason or another. While they’re in no particular order of importance or influence, today I thought we’d start with a name that many are familiar with — Vitalik Buterin.

This Russian-Canadian programer just celebrated his 25th birthday and though he has been involved in the Bitcoin community since he was just 18 and even co-founded and wrote articles for Bitcoin magazine, Vitalik is primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum. But this young man’s genius has been evident since very early on.

Born in Russia but moving with his family to Canada at the age of 6, Vitalik’s advanced intellect was soon recognized and in the third grade he was promoted to classes for gifted youth. He went on to attend a private high school in Toronto of which he has been quoted as saying made him “want to learn, and to focus on learning as my primary goal.”

He first heard about Bitcoin from his dad and shortly thereafter he began writing articles for a Bitcoin website and just a short time later he became a co-founder and lead writer for Bitcoin Magazine.

At the mere age of 19 while attending the University of Waterloo, Buterin published his white paper proposing Ethereum. Just a short time later, right at the same time of Vitalik’s 20th birthday and after numerous meetings and discussions with his peers that were almost as excited about the Ethereum prospects as he was, the project was publicly announced.

With a core team joining him that consisted of Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio and Joe Lubin, they were able to hold an Ether crowdsale to help fund development just a few short months later. Around this same time, Vitalik received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship grant and dropped out of school in order to work on Ethereum full-time.

The crowdsale sold Ether, the native token of the Etherum network, in exchange for Bitcoin. This raised over $20 million worth of the reigning cryptocurrency at a rate of about $18 per minute, the third most successful crowdfunding campaign to date.

Vitalik and the team utilized those funds to establish the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, which is based in Switzerland and was responsible for overseeing the open source software development for Ethereum.

Other projects Vitalik has been involved in:

• Kryptokit
• Pybitcointools
• Multisig.info
• Btckeysplit
• Editorial board of Ledger

In 2012, he obtained a bronze medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics and in 2014 he received a World Technology Award in the IT Software category.

He has also received acclaimed recognition from:

• Fortune’s 40 under 40 list in 2016
• Fortune’s 40 under 40 list in 2018
• Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in 2018
• An honorary doctorate from the University of Basel in 2018

Vitalik is known to have learned the Chinese language in just a few short months utilizing an app on his phone, which seems to have helped the Ethereum platform’s relationship with that country’s leadership. Ethereum is being researched and integrated on institutional levels in China and Peking University is creating an Ethereum Laboratory to work on protocol improvements as well as application use cases that can be used for the country’s supply chains and energy markets.

In 2017, Buterin met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and held a speech regarding Blockchain where more than 5,000 people attended. Moscow has one of the biggest node clusters on the entire Ethereum network and even though he left Russia at the age of 6, Vitalik is an extremely prominent and well-regarded person in that country.

Vitalik continues to be active in the industry, publishing papers on his website on occasion and tweeting/retweeting fairly regularly to his 840k followers. With everything the man has already accomplished in a mere 25 years on this earth, it will definitely be interesting to see what other brilliance he has in store for us in the future.