Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin is best known for being a co-founder of Ethereum, along with co-founders Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin.

Born in Russia, to a computer scientist/entrepreneur father and journalist mother, he moved to Canada when he was six years old.

Buterin came across Bitcoin in 2011.

As Bitcoin was still new, he joined the community by writing articles for crypto blogs and websites.

This eventually led to him co-founding Bitcoin Magazine in 2011, becoming its leading writer.

In 2013, Buterin first published his ideas behind Ethereum in a whitepaper, proposing that Bitcoin (BTC) lacked a scripting language for application development.

When he failed to gain support from other developers in the bitcoin community, he proposed a completely new platform with such a scripting language.

His dislike for centralized services was the driving force in creating decentralized money, along with being involved in building software and tools that would affect thousands of people around the world.

Buterin is a huge supporter of open-source software and contributes to open-source software projects.

Vitalik is also involved in other cryptocurrency projects, including Darkwallet, Bitcoin Python libraries, Egora, Zcash, Kyber network, Lighting Network and Prysmatic Labs.

You can follow Buterin’s thoughts and developments on his personal website at https://vitalik.ca/, which, even in 2022, he still updates regularly.

Related Terms

Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform that makes digital money, global payments, and applications possible using open-source software and smart contract functionality. The big difference between the two is that Ethereum is programmable, meaning you can build and use decentralized apps on the network. That means the Ethereum blockchain can be programmed to do virtually anything.

Cardano (ADA)

Cardano is a decentralized open-source blockchain platform built with proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, offering smart contract capabilities, and using the native cryptocurrency ADA.

Charles Hoskinson

Charles Hoskinson is a technology entrepreneur and mathematician famous for co-founding Cardano, Ethereum, and Input Output Global, Inc. (formerly IOHK). Cardano was developed by IOHK and Hoskinson.

Shiba Inu (SHIB)

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is an ERC-20 token built on Ethereum that’s reported to be 100% run by its community. “The Dogecoin killer” is the second most famous altcoin and meme coin behind Dogecoin, even though it has a faithful army of 500,000 members called the SHIB Army promoting it on social media.

Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin (BTC) is most well known as a digital decentralized cryptocurrency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries, such as payment gateways or banks or routing services. Think of bitcoin as Internet money, that you can send and receive directly, to and from anyone, and you can use it to pay for stuff.