24 Facts About Vitalik Buterin

Vitaly Dmitrievich Buterin, better known as Vitalik Buterin, is a Canadian computer programmer and co-founder of Ethereum.

In 2015, Vitalik Buterin deployed the Ethereum blockchain with Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin.

Vitalik Buterin was born in Kolomna, Russia, to a Russian family.

Vitalik Buterin then attended The Abelard School, a private high school in Toronto.

Vitalik Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father at the age of 17.

In 2012, Vitalik Buterin won a bronze medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics in Italy.

Vitalik Buterin returned to Toronto later that year and published a white paper proposing Ethereum.

Vitalik Buterin dropped out of university in 2014 when he was awarded with a grant of US$100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship, a scholarship created by venture capitalist Peter Thiel and went to work on Ethereum full-time.

On 30 November 2018, Vitalik Buterin received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Basel.

In 2011, Vitalik Buterin began writing for a publication called Bitcoin Weekly after meeting a person on a bitcoin forum with the aim of earning bitcoin.

Vitalik Buterin wrote for the site until it shut down soon thereafter due to insufficient revenue.

In September 2011, Mihai Alisie reached out to Vitalik Buterin about starting a new print publication called Bitcoin Magazine, a position which Vitalik Buterin would accept as the first co-founder and contribute to as a leading writer.

Vitalik Buterin is the inventor of Ethereum, described as a "decentralised mining network and software development platform rolled into one" that facilitates the creation of new cryptocurrencies and programs that share a single blockchain.

Vitalik Buterin first described Ethereum in a white paper in November 2013.

Vitalik Buterin had argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development.

Vitalik Buterin delivered a 25-minute speech, describing the general-purpose global computer operating on a decentralized permissionless network, ending with potential uses for Ethereum that ranged from crop insurance to decentralized exchanges to DAOs.

Vitalik Buterin has stated that he was driven to create decentralized money because his World of Warcraft character was nerfed, specifically by patch 3.1.0.

Vitalik Buterin has contributed as a developer to other open-source software projects.

Vitalik Buterin contributed to DarkWallet by Cody Wilson, Bitcoin Python libraries, and the cryptocurrency marketplace site Egora.

Vitalik Buterin came into contact with economist Glen Weyl after tweeting about Weyl's proposal for a new wealth tax.

In May 2021, Vitalik Buterin donated $665 million to the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit which, amongst other things, seeks to mitigate the existential risk from artificial intelligence.

Vitalik Buterin spoke out in support of Ukraine amid its invasion by Russia in 2022.

Vitalik Buterin had claimed that people who said they were ashamed to be Russians because of Moscow's actions against Ukraine were, in fact, not Russians at all.

Vitalik Buterin has donated crypto to projects supporting the country and endorsed projects helping Ukraine through "cryptophilanthropy".