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The formation
Born in 1994 in Moscow, Buterin moved with his family to Toronto, Canada, when he was just 5 years old. Identified from an early age as a mathematical genius, Buterin began attending a special class for gifted children from the fourth grade onwards, during which one of his hobbies consisted in testing and discovering all the different functions of Excel.
His father Dmitry, a computer engineer, was the first to introduce him to the world of cryptocurrency and in particular to Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency born in 2008 from the mind of "Satoshi Nakamoto". After overcoming the initial skepticism, "My first reaction was of rejection. How could I be interested in a technology that had so little impact on the world?", the curiosity of the young teenager took over, leading him to do research and discover the world of cryptolovers. Too young to be able to enter the market, Buterin found an agreement with a blog author for a paid collaboration in Bitcoin: 5 virtual coins for each article (beware, at the time 5 bitcoins amounted to about $4, and not the current $37k!!!). Soon, his articles were noticed by the 23-year-old Romanian programmer Mihai Alisie, with whom he decided to found an online magazine called Bitcoin Magazine that officially opened in September 2011 and quickly became a reference point for fans of the industry.
In 2012 Buterin won the bronze medal at the International Computer Science Olympics.
As soon as he had the chance, Buterin started travelling and following the call of the cryptocurrency, dividing his time between Silicon Valley (but also London, Amsterdam, Las Vegas) and Israel, where he met the programmers of Mastercoin, a startup offering blockchain-based services to the world of finance. It was precisely this reality, together with the idea of smart contract, born from the entrepreneur Nick Szabo, that unleashed in the young Vitalik, at the time only 19 years old, the concept that will become the basis of the Ethereum platform.
2014: the birth of Ethereum
After his idea for Ethereum was judged by the Mastercoin group as unattainable, Buterin continued to work on it alone, then in the last months of 2013 submitted the project to a group of trusted developers with a White Paper, "When I got the idea for Ethereum, my first thought was, "it's too good to be true"", fearing he had overlooked some basic impossibility of realization. Together with this team, Buterin moved to Switzerland to work on the project, in what will later become known as the Crypto Valley. The initial project was officially presented at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami in January 2014, receiving a standing ovation from the present.
2014 marked the turning point for Vitalik: he abandoned his studies at the University of Waterloo immediately after receiving the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious $100,000 prize to develop his project. In the same year, the group of developers, now a non-profit organization called Ethereum Foundation, launched the virtual currency Ether to raise the necessary money and finance the development of the platform.
Two words about Ethereum
The first version of Ethereum ever presented to the market was called Olympic and was launched in 2015: although the prototype of the platform was promising, the code was full of bugs: Ethereum therefore launched a reward program called Ethereum Bounty Program, which gave Ether to anyone who was able to report a bug. After this first experiment, the Ethereum platform officially launched on March 14, 2016, just over two years after its first presentation.
In 2014, Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, published the Ethereum Yellow Paper, where he provided very detailed technical specifications on the Ethereum client, implemented in seven different programming languages: C++, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, Haskell and Rust.
The concept behind Ethereum is the same key principle as the blockchain; decentralization. This means that the register on which all transactions and agreements are indicated is anonymous, encrypted and distributed among tens of thousands of nodes. In creating Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin says that he "put together everything that interests me: mathematics, cryptography, economics and politics. It is a fascinating experience that I live with a community swaying between capitalism and social pressures, but always with a strong libertarian impulse". Since its official launch in 2016, the Ethereum platform has been exploited by countless startups in a wide variety of fields, from music to electronic voting and everything in between.
Every year for the past five years, Ethereum developers, creators and researchers have met at an event called Devcon, the 2019 event was in Japan in October.
To date, the Executive Director of Ethereum Foundation is Aya Miyaguchi.
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