Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin, the brain behind the Ethereum project, is one of the most significant figures in today’s crypto ecosystem. His involvement in the Blockchain industry started in 2011. Since then, he has managed to assert himself as a force to be reckoned with in the cryptocurrency industry. In the following article, we will list seven things you probably didn’t know about this blockchain genius.
Vitalik was just 19 years old when he came up with the idea for a better version of Bitcoin. The most important modification was the fact that the new Ethereum blockchain could execute advanced scripts that are called smart contracts. The smart contracts can be executed using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), a runtime environment that can run Turing complete scripts on the top of the blockchain. This was a huge step which allowed the development of decentralized apps on the top of the Ethereum Blockchain.
His father, Dmitry Buterin, a serial entrepreneur was the one who introduced Bitcoin to Vitalik when he was 17. Although Vitalik didn’t bother exploring it until later.
When his parents moved from Russian to Canada Vitalik was enrolled in an elementary school in Canada. When he got to third grade, the school authorities decided to place him in a class for gifted children. From the time spent in the talented children class, Vitalik became drawn to economics, programming, and mathematics. It was also discovered that Vitalik could add up three-digit numbers in his head at twice the speed of his classmates.
Vitalik is estimated to be worth about $400-500 Million. This number is based on his stake in Ethereum (the number of ETH assigned to him during the initial stages of the project launch). He is also reported to have a sizeable amount of BTC in his possession.
He is a prominent blockchain contributor. He started out writing for various Bitcoin-related forums until he was able to book a consistent writing gig with a blog. The blog owner agreed to pay him in Bitcoins amounting to 5BTC for every approved blog post he made. He later went on to co-found the Bitcoin Magazine, which is now a high-profile cryptocurrency magazine. Vitalik was also appointed as the head writer of the magazine while he was still there.
In 2014, to enable him to receive the Thiel Fellowship grant which was worth $100,000, Vitalik dropped out of the University of Waterloo. At that time, the Ethereum project had already been announced, and an ETH crowd sale was underway.
On June 25, 2017, news, originating from 4Chan, reported that Vitalik was involved in a car accident which claimed his life. The outbreak of this news led to a drop in the value of the ETH market cap to about $4billion.
To sum up, we must agree that Vitalik is not only unique and colorful character within the blockchain industry, but he has done a lot in his 24 years so far.
