Vitalik Buterin is best known as the co-founder of Ethereum, one of the largest blockchain networks in the world. He is currently 28 years old and has Russian and Canadian ancestry. He is also a programmer and writer. He excelled in his early years, but later dropped out after receiving a $100,000 grant.
His first foray into cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) was when he was 17 years old and his father was his introductory mentor. In 2013, he published a white paper on Ethereum, which he was inspired by. Subsequently, he gained a worldwide reputation and won several awards. More recently, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Business School of the University of Bern in Basel.
Vitalik Buterin is one of the world's leading figures at the forefront of cryptocurrencies.
Most revolutionary ideas have a leader in name only. Usually, it is the person who gives the orders and acts as a spokesman. The term "leader" seems well suited to describe such people.
The same goes for cryptocurrencies.
Today, cryptocurrencies are arguably the most revolutionary concept in the world. As a product of blockchain, it has been applied in every industry and has transformed the financial system globally.
Many celebrities have adopted cryptocurrency technology, but at the same time, there are also many ordinary people who are involved in it like Vitalik Buterin.
This article will delve into his story and why he is one of the world's top unofficial cryptocurrency gods.
The childhood of V God
Vitalik Buterin was born in Russia on January 31, 1984, to computer scientist parents. He lived there for six years and then the family immigrated to Canada in hopes of a better life.
After the father separated from his mother, the father subsequently had a second marriage, after which he had two half-sisters.
Vitalik's programmer father, Dmitry, put him in his early years in tech. He encouraged his son to become computer-savvy, which paid off early on. Vitalik created macros for Excel at the age of four, and two years later, he created his own virtual universe on Excel.
After they moved to Canada, he continued to learn computer languages. At the age of 10, he wrote his first program in C++ and then developed a game called "Tutorial".
V God's school career
Vitalik was placed in a gifted children's class early in elementary school. He was attracted to mathematics, programming, and economics, and showed great potential in these areas.
He then attended a private high school, where he showed great desire and enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge. He then enrolled in university, where he took advanced courses and worked as a research assistant for a well-written cryptographer.
V God's encounter with cryptocurrencies
Back when he was 17 years old, Vitalik's father introduced him to cryptocurrencies through Bitcoin.
His interest in Bitcoin is growing day by day, and he wants to gain insight into the Bitcoin space, but he has some limitations. First, he can't mine these tokens because he lacks the computing power he needs or the money to buy them. However, he did not give up his lofty ambitions in the crypto field because of these limitations.
In 2011, he began writing about Bitcoin on an online blog called Bitcoin Weekly, earning 5 BTC (equivalent to about $3.50 at the time). He persisted until the site was shut down due to limited revenue.
His article caught the attention of Romanian bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie. In September of the same year, they collaborated to start Bitcoin Magazine. Vitalik became a co-founder of the magazine and continued his writing work.
Because he spent a considerable amount of time focusing on his new Bitcoin magazine and related work. Because the schedule could not be arranged, he decided to withdraw from school. From this point of view, V God's dropout from school was not a whim, but a deliberate one.
V God and Ethereum
With a wealth of knowledge, Vitalik has traveled the world, researching several cryptographic projects with enough time and expertise.
He concluded that the projects were cookie-cutter, that there were no points of innovation, and that V God held his own ideas on how to improve them, but unfortunately, he was fired. In the end, he chose to start a business and personally innovated the encryption project, thus founding "Ethereum".
He wrote a white paper on Ethereum in late 2013 and shared his finished white paper with some friends who in turn shared it with others. As a result, V God gathered with some people of insight who had the same ideas and ambitions as him and formed a team, which showed that his ideas were affirmed, feasible, and eventually most likely successful.
In less than a year, they improved Ethereum's vision from a mere digital currency to a decentralized platform. Subsequently, he presented Ethereum at the Bitcoin Conference in the United States, further raising the mainstream attention of Ethereum.
Soon after, they held an initial coin offering for ethereum, the token of the Ethereum network, to fund the development of Ethereum. They raised more than 30,000 BTC (about $18 million at the time) from the offering. Meanwhile, Vitalik received a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Scholarship. All of this makes Ethereum's crowdfunding campaign worthwhile and profitable.
Years later, Ethereum has grown to become one of the world's leading blockchain networks.
Ethereum is an extremely influential blockchain platform that supports basic decentralized financial (DeFi) applications such as smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps).
The cryptocurrency Ether runs on its unique blockchain network. With a market price of nearly $3,000, Ether ranks second in the market, second only to Bitcoin, with a market share of 18.44%.
V God's Awards and Honors
Vitalik has received many prestigious awards, such as the 2014 Thiel Scholarship; the 2014 World Technology Award for IT Software; the 2016 Fortune 40 List; the 2018 Forbes List of The Rich Under 30; the Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bern in 2018; and the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine in 2021.
God's act of charity
In recent years, he has made quite a lot of contributions in many ways, each of which has left an extremely impressive impression.
In 2017, he donated more than $700,000 to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; the following year donated more than $2 million to the SENS Research Foundation; another $50,000 to the organization in 2020; and a $1 billion shiba to India's Crypto Covid relief fund in 2021. In the same year, ELON worth more than $300 million was donated to the Masuelah Foundation.
In February 2022, he tweeted against Russia's decision to invade Ukraine.
God's plan for the future
Vitalik Buterin plans to put Ethereum at the forefront of technological advancements.
Start with ETH2, which is a simple upgrade to ETH (Ethereum 1). ETH2 is a project designed to make the modern version of Ethereum faster, more scalable, and less costly than the former.
In addition, Ethereum plans to enter the metaverse. A typical example is the newly developed Ethereum Name Service (ENS) model, which provides Web 3 usernames for decentralized websites.
Author: Gate.io Researcher Valentine A.