Home Commercial Awareness Vitalik Buterin Becomes The Youngest Billionaire

Vitalik Buterin Becomes The Youngest Billionaire

by Olga Pilat

Vitalik Buterin is a 27-year-old Canadian-Russian writer and programmer. He’s most known for inventing Ethereum before even turning 20 and co-creating Bitcoin Magazine. His interest in experimental economics and uncanny mind made him the youngest billionaire in 2021.

Who is Vitalik Buterin?

Vitalik Buterin was born in Russia but he emigrated with his family to Canada when he was six. His father, Dmitry Buterin, is a computer scientist who co-founded a blockchain startup incubator, Blockgeeks Lab.

According to Dmitry, Vitalik wrote the “Encyclopedia of Bunnies” at the age of seven. It had a whole universe populated by bunnies but it was governed by very strict formulas. This seems like the perfect beginning of the creative mind which invented the second hottest cryptocurrency.

The Early Career

Vitalik attended the University of Waterloo. He was a research assistant to a cryptographer, Ian Goldberg. Before Ethereum, there was Bitcoin Magazine. Vitalik Buterin co-created it with Mihai Alise. It covered topics on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

On top of that, during that time he wrote a white paper on Ethereum. After receiving the Thiel Fellowship scholarship, Vitalik dropped out of the University of Waterloo and moved on to work on Ethereum full-time.

Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin had a vision of a decentralised economy with increased access, transparency and accountability. His published white paper on Ethereum looked beyond Bitcoin’s mission of enabling unstoppable, unmediated digital payments, and envisioned a platform for autonomous software of all kinds.

In 2015, Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin and others launched the Ethereum, the world’s programmable blockchain. It works as an open software platform functioning on blockchain technology. This blockchain is hosted on many computers around the world, making it decentralized.

The Ethereum blockchain is similar to Bitcoin’s in that it is a record of the transaction history. However, the Ethereum network allows developers to build and deploy decentralised applications (apps). Dapps have their backend code (smart contracts) running on a decentralized network and not a centralized server. They use the Ethereum blockchain for data storage and smart contracts for their app logic.

In 2019, Buterin proposed Ethereum 2.0, which included plans to decrease the blockchain’s transaction throughput traffic, decrease network costs, and increase rewards for the node validators.

The Youngest Billionaire

Currently, Ether is the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. Both cryptocurrencies have seen astronomical surges in 2020 and 2021 as the mainstream finance world embrace crypto as a legitimate asset.

Ethereum’s cryptocurrency, Ether, surged past $3,000 for the first time on 3 May 2021, marking a 325% rise since the beginning of the year. Vitalik Buterin’s ether address, which he disclosed in October 2018 as his main ether wallet, holds 333,520 ETH, worth $1.09 billion at the ether price of $3,278 at 1:30 p.m. ET on May 3 2021. This makes him the youngest billionaire and is one of the hallmark events for cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

Philanthropist

Apart from achievements as a writer and programmer, Vitalik is also a philanthropist. In 2017, Vitalik donated $763,970 worth of ether to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. In 2018, he donated $2.4 million to the SENS Research Foundation and $1 million to charity for Ugandan Refugees.

Last week, Buterin donated about $600,000 in ether and maker (MKR) tokens to a COVID-19 relief fund for India. These did not stop him from reaching his billionaire status and only served to validate his established position in the financial world.

Conclusion

Vitalik Buterin is a brilliant young man who early in his life became interested in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Just like Bitcoin founders and unlike Dogecoin founders, he strives to revolutionise the financial world. Becoming the youngest billionaire, thanks to Ethereum, shows he is on the right path to achieving it.

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