Vitalik Buterin co-founder of Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin is one of the most influential figures in the cryptocurrency space, as the co-founder of Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain platform by market capitalization and the most popular platform for decentralized applications (DApps). Buterin is also a visionary thinker, a prolific writer, and a respected leader in the crypto community.

Buterin was born in Russia in 1994, and moved to Canada with his family when he was six years old. He showed an early interest and talent in mathematics, programming, and economics. He learned about Bitcoin from his father in 2011, when he was 17 years old, and became fascinated by the potential of decentralized digital money.

He started writing articles for Bitcoin Magazine, a publication he co-founded with Mihai Alisie. He also traveled around the world to meet other crypto enthusiasts and developers. He realized that Bitcoin had some limitations, such as its rigid scripting language and its inability to support complex applications beyond simple transactions.

In 2013, he wrote a white paper proposing Ethereum, a blockchain platform that would allow anyone to create and run any kind of DApp using a Turing-complete programming language called Solidity. He envisioned Ethereum as a "world computer" that would enable a new era of decentralized, censorship-resistant, and trustless applications.

He gathered a team of eight co-founders to work on Ethereum, including Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, Joseph Lubin, Amir Chetrit, Jeffrey Wilcke, and Mihai Alisie. They launched a crowdfunding campaign in 2014, raising over $18 million worth of Bitcoin. They also established the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the development and research of Ethereum.

Ethereum went live on July 30, 2015, with the launch of the Genesis block. Since then, Ethereum has grown to become the most active and innovative blockchain platform in the industry, hosting thousands of DApps ranging from decentralized finance (DeFi) to gaming to social media. Ethereum also introduced the concept of smart contracts, self-executing agreements that can facilitate transactions without intermediaries.

Buterin has been actively involved in the development and governance of Ethereum, as well as in the wider crypto community. He has contributed to various research papers and technical proposals on topics such as scalability, privacy, proof-of-stake, sharding, plasma, zk-SNARKs, and more. He has also advocated for social causes such as internet freedom, open source software, and basic income.

Buterin is widely respected for his intelligence, humility, and vision. He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work on Ethereum, such as the Thiel Fellowship in 2014, the World Technology Award in 2014, the Fortune 40 under 40 list in 2016 and 2018, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel in 2018.

Buterin is currently working on Ethereum 2.0, a major upgrade that aims to improve the scalability, security, and sustainability of Ethereum by transitioning from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and introducing sharding and other technical improvements. He is also exploring other areas of interest such as quadratic funding, mechanism design, social choice theory, and cryptography.

Buterin is one of the most influential figures in the cryptocurrency space because he co-founded Ethereum, wrote its white paper, contributed to its development and research, supported its community and ecosystem, and advocated for its vision. He is also a visionary thinker, a prolific writer, and a respected leader in the crypto community.

‍

The birth of Ethereum

In late 2013, Buterin described his idea in a white paper, which he sent out to a few of his friends, who shared it even more. As a result, about 30 people reached out to Buterin to discuss the concept. Initially, the idea behind Ethereum was still very much about digital currency. Over time, the vision changed, and by the end of January 2014, the team had realized that it was relatively easy to create decentralized file storage and that concepts like name registry can be brought to life with just a couple of lines of code.

The project was publicly announced in January 2014, with the core team consisting of Buterin, Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Joe Lubin and Gavin Wood. Buterin also presented Ethereum on stage at a Bitcoin conference in Miami. A few months later, the team decided to hold an initial coin offering (ICO) of ETH, the native token of the Ethereum network, to fund the development. Around the same time, Buterin himself received the Thiel Fellowship grant of $100,000.

The team raised more than 31,000 BTC from the sale of ETH, or around $18 million at the time. The Ethereum team established the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland that was tasked with overseeing Ethereum’s open-source software development. Despite some turbulence, Ethereum’s crowdfunding campaign turned out to be successful.

Overall, Ethereum’s design is meant to adhere to several principles, including simplicity, universality, modularity, agility, non-discrimination and non-censorship.

The Ethereum network regularly undergoes upgrades to improve its underlying architecture, such as the London and Berlin upgrades and the Shanghai hard fork. These upgrades bring together several network changes to continue Ethereum’s natural progression toward the Ethereum consensus layer upgrade previously known as Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2).

‍

The DAO attack

Apart from building decentralized applications (DApps) and various other use cases, the Ethereum platform enables users to set up and run decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). The DAO raised over $150 million in ETH from more than 11,000 members. However, the DAO was hacked due to flaws in its codebase.

Because of this, Buterin advocated for a soft fork of the Ethereum network that included a snippet of code, blacklisting the attacker and preventing them from moving the stolen cash.

However, according to the smart contract’s regulations, the attacker (or someone portraying themselves as the hacker) wrote an open letter to the Ethereum community claiming that the funds were gained legally. The assailant further stated that anyone attempting to seize Ether would face legal consequences.

As a result, the Ethereum blockchain was hard forked to restore the stolen funds (but not everyone agreed), resulting in the network separating into two blockchains: Ethereum (the newer blockchain) and Ethereum Classic (the original blockchain).

This was extremely controversial, as blockchains are intended to be unchangeable and censorship-resistant. The scenario posed technical difficulties and called into question the technology’s moral and philosophical foundations, as well as the Ethereum project’s leadership’s resilience.

Ethereum is more popular than Ethereum Classic, and it has the support of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which has over 200 members, including financial titans, such as JPMorgan and Citigroup. Another distinction is that the Ethereum chain has switched from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus method to make the Ethereum network faster, more efficient and capable of scaling transactions dramatically.

In retrospect, it’s evident that Buterin, Ethereum developers and the worldwide community made decisions that assured the blockchain’s survival in its early days. Ethereum has grown in importance as a pillar of blockchain, cryptocurrency and decentralized finance since The DAO hack.

‍

Ethereum’s scalability issues and transition to the PoS consensus mechanism

Buterin realized that the popularity of Ethereum’s PoW version had caused network fees to skyrocket, making transactions prohibitively expensive for the average user. This insight led Buterin to admit that the development of Ethereum was taking longer than expected, with the switch to a PoS consensus mechanism taking six years as opposed to the originally projected one.

After realizing the need to increase transaction throughput and handle network congestion, Ethereum adopted sharding as a solution (as a part of the Merge upgrade). By splitting the Ethereum network into shard chains, sharding makes it possible to distribute network load among several shards. The goal is to greatly boost transaction throughput and relieve network congestion.

The Merge refers to the integration of Ethereum’s original execution layer (mainnet) with its new proof-of-stake consensus layer (Beacon Chain). This transition eliminates the need for energy-intensive mining and allows the network to be secured through staked ETH.

However, Buterin and his team’s more centralized approach has replaced the decentralized strategy that developers and miners had previously used. The expectations of tokenholders have also altered: They now see Ether more as an investment asset than as a decentralized form of money.

‍

Philanthropic efforts and awards

On May 12, 2021, Buterin was praised for donating $1.2 billion to India’s COVID-19 relief fund and putting a leash on dog memecoins (which had been gifted into his Etherscan public wallet). These tokens included Akita Inu (AKITA), Shiba Inu and Dogelon Mars (ELON).

The most significant payment, 13,292 ETH, was sent to GiveWell, a nonprofit charity evaluation service. The Methuselah Foundation, which focuses on making people live longer, received 1,000 ETH and 430 billion ELON tokens. He donated 1,050 ETH to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is dedicated to ensuring that artificial intelligence has a positive influence on society.

Buterin was awarded the Thiel Fellowship Award in 2014 to bring his innovative scientific and technical projects to life. He also won the World Technology Network (WTN) prize for IT software in 2014, defeating Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. He also made it to the Fortune 40 Under 40 list and the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

In 2018, the University of Basel awarded Buterin an honorary degree. The university’s Faculty of Business and Economics recognized him for his work on blockchain development at the Dies Academicus, an annual celebration of the institution’s founding.

In May 2021, Buterin made a significant donation to various charitable causes related to COVID-19 relief in India. He transferred a substantial amount of cryptocurrency, including 500 ETH and over 50 trillion SHIB tokens, collectively valued at approximately $1.14 billion at the time, to India’s COVID-Crypto Relief Fund.

‍

Buterin’s plans for the future

Buterin expects that Ethereum will be “ruling the metaverse” in 10 years. The metaverse is an idea for a vast virtual world where people can interact with one another and with digital objects as avatars.

According to him, Ethereum is amazingly positioned to be a fundamental part of the metaverse, as the internet plus the shared state allow objects to flow between platforms. Overall, he believes that the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) ecosystem provides a Web3 username for crypto addresses and decentralized websites, as well as the concept of users and items having cross-platform identities. This is an obvious application that people don’t understand, but ENS offers these solutions.

Buterin is most intrigued by the Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge, or zk-SNARKS, a cryptographic proof that allows one party to establish that it has specific information without exposing it. It essentially eliminates the need for interaction between the prover and the verifier.

He also believes that zk-SNARKs will be the most extensively deployed privacy-preserving technology in the next 30 years. Buterin thinks it will be “a big revolution” as it spreads into the mainstream over the next 10–20 years.

Additionally, at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in July 2022, Buterin outlined Ethereum’s future plans. The updates include transitioning to proof-of-stake (the Merge), implementing sharding for scalability (the Surge), introducing Verkle trees for efficiency (the Verge), reducing storage requirements (the Purge), and enhancing quantum resistance (the Splurge). These updates aim to address speed, scalability and cost issues, making Ethereum more efficient and capable of processing thousands of transactions per second.

‍

proMatrix Capital

Official Site: https://www.promtrx.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Promtrx