Vitalik Buterin, the Russian programmer who created Ethereum at the age of 19, is officially a billionaire
Nickie Louise
Posted On May 5, 2021
Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer who created Ethereum in 2013 when he was just 19 years old. Born on January 31, 1994, in Kolomna, Russia, to Dmitry Buterin, a computer scientist, and Natalia Ameline, Buterin is best known as the creator of Ethereum.
Today, the 27-year-old Buterin is officially a billionaire. Buterin holds about 333,500 ether in his public wallet in the cryptocurrency he launched eight years ago. With Ether at a $3,500 record high as of Tuesday, Buterin is now worth more than $1.1 billion. Not bad for the then 17-year old programmer who was offered five bitcoin (about $3.50 at the time) to write bitcoin articles.
Today, the total market value of all Ethereum in circulation stands close to half a trillion ($403 billion), according to CoinMarketCap.
How it all started
At the age of six, his parents emigrated to Canada in search of a better life. In third grade, Buterin was placed into a class for gifted children and was drawn to mathematics, programming, and economics. At the age of 17, Buterin later learned about Bitcoin from his father.
Buterin attended the University of Waterloo after high school and took advanced courses and was a research assistant for cryptographer Ian Goldberg, who co-created Off-the-Record Messaging and was the former board of directors chairman of the Tor Project. In 2012, Buterin won a bronze medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics. In the same year, Buterin also co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, a publication that covers bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
In 2013, Buterin attended developers’ conferences in other countries who shared his enthusiasm for coding. He later returned to Toronto later that year and published a white paper proposing Ethereum.
In 2014, he dropped out of university after he was selected to be part of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program created by billionaire Peter Thiel that “gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” The rest, as they say, is history.
Today, Buterin is a rockstar in the tech circles. Below is a video of the Russian President Putin introducing Buterin to the members of the Russian parliament.
