Vitalik Buterin has been a well-known name in the cryptocurrency community for years for being one of the co-founders and the most visible face behind , the second most important cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and on which the smart contract systems or smart contracts are based. , among other things, have fueled the NFT craze of recent months.
But Buterin, still 28, has been getting a lot more attention lately. With his success, the lanky-looking young man became the “world’s youngest crypto millionaire,” according to Forbes, with an estimated fortune of al.
This Russian-born Canadian national has emerged as the voice of crypto conscience, attacking Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. Also some of his statements against the well-known NFT BoredApe, whom he accused of speculation and promoting inequality, have caused talk within the world.
But, where does the one that many now consider one of the technological brains of the future come from?
His family left Russia when he was very young.
Buterin was born on the outskirts of Moscow in 1994, the son of two computer scientists, Dmitry Buterin and Natalia Ameline. Like his parents, Vitalik was interested in numbers. For example, at just 4 years old, Buterin “inherited” his parents’ old IBM computer, according to TIME magazine, where he has starred in his latest cover, and began to ‘play’ with Excel.
The family moved from Russia to Canada when Buterin was 6 years old, and at 7, “he could recite more than a hundred digits of the number pi, and shouted mathematical equations to pass the time,” according to a recent interview he gave to the magazine and where other testimonies of his childhood appear.
At the age of 12 he started programming and today he dominates almost six languages and disciplines such as sociological theory, advanced calculus and the history of taxes, always according to this report.
But his first contact with the crypto world takes us back to when he was 17 years old. So Buterin was introduced to Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, thanks to his father.
At first, he dismissed the idea, but later became interested in the possibilities of blockchain after a bad experience with the developers of the World of Warcraft game. Buterin was captivated by the idea of a decentralized platform not controlled by any one entity.
Bitcoin before Ethereum
At 18, Buterin co-founded one of the leading digital cryptocurrency publications and became its editor-in-chief, Bitcoin Magazine.
He put together this project while attending the University of Waterloo, but Buterin dropped out of college in 2013 and began writing what would become the Ethereum white paper.
“When I came up with Ethereum, my first thought was, ‘OK this thing is too good to be true and I’m going to have five professional cryptographers coming at me and telling me how stupid I am for not seeing a bunch of very obvious flaws.’ Buterin told the magazine in another interview. “Two weeks later I was very surprised that none of that happened. It turned out that the core idea of Ethereum was good, fundamentally, completely, sound.”
In 2014, Buterin was named one of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Fellows and received a $100,000 investment to invest in his work.
Now he is the voice against Putin in the crypto world
In 2022, Buterin hopes to “try to be more risky and less neutral,” he told TIME. “I’d rather Ethereum offend some people than it become something that doesn’t stand for anything.”
Buterin recently condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, tweeting “This is a crime against the Ukrainian and Russian people.”
“One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that it has reminded a lot of people in the cryptocurrency space that ultimately the point of cryptocurrency is not to mess around with million dollar pictures of monkeys,” referring to BoredApe. but to do things that have significant effects in the real world,” Buterin said.
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