Even if you are a novice user who has just entered the cryptocurrency field, you are still very likely to have heard the name of Vitalik Buterin (V God).
And it's a natural thing.
Even before he turned 20, Buterin co-founded Ethereum, the smart contract blockchain project that kickstarted the development of decentralized applications (dApps). Ethereum fueled the ICO boom in 2017, the DeFi boom in 2020, and the rapid adoption of NFTs last year.
Meanwhile, the platform’s native digital asset, ether (ETH), has maintained the second-largest market capitalization of all tokens throughout its history.
In addition to being the mastermind behind Ethereum, Vitalik has been involved in multiple projects, collaborating with industry professionals, supporting the development of innovative ideas and initiatives, and sharing his views on many key issues in crypto, economics, and even politics.
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early life
Vitalik was born on January 31, 1994 in Kolomna, Russia, where he lived until he was six years old. Subsequently, his parents decided to immigrate to Canada in search of better employment opportunities.
Interestingly, even in Buterin's early life, he was quite the standout. In third grade, his elementary school in Canada placed him in a gifted and gifted class for children.
Over the course of the course, his classmates and teachers regarded him as a "wizard," gifted in mathematics, economics, and programming. Interestingly, Buterin even once said in an interview that it took him a long time to discover that extracurricular social activities were "important" in his school days.
While his childhood talent lessons led him down a lonely path at the time, Vitalik used the opportunity to sharpen his skills and learn more in computer science and economics. Later, Buterin attended the private Abelard High School in Toronto, which drastically changed his perspective on education and made knowledge his main goal in life.
After graduation, Vitalik became a student at the University of Waterloo, where he took five advanced courses and worked as a part-time research assistant with cryptographer Ian Goldberg. Ian Goldberg is the co-creator of the Off-the-Record (OTR) protocol (and former chairman of the board of the privacy-focused Tor Project).
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Start a Crypto Career
The most interesting part of Vitalik's biography concerns how he began to develop his views on the dangers of centralization and the benefits of individual sovereignty and decentralization.
When Buterin was a high school student, he was a hardcore player of the World of Warcraft MMO until an update completely changed the talents of one of his characters, so he quit the game:
"I loved World of Warcraft from 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved Warlock's Siphon Life spell. I slept in tears and realized that centralization What a nightmare to serve, I quickly decided to get out of the game," he said in his public bio.
Interestingly, Vitalik first heard about Bitcoin in 2011 from his father, Dmitry Buterin, a computer scientist who at the time had his own small software startup. Like many in the early days of cryptocurrency, he initially dismissed the idea of Bitcoin (BTC), arguing that a currency with no intrinsic value was "doomed to fail."
However, Vitalik's second encounter with Bitcoin convinced him to join the industry. While he doesn't know exactly how this happened (he said he might need to find a new obsession after quitting World of Warcraft), Buterin got his first paycheck in the crypto industry in 2011 for Bitcoin Weekly's Topic publications get 5 BTC per article (worth $3.50 at the time) for writing articles.
Later, Bitcoin Weekly discontinued its service due to insufficient revenue. However, that hasn't stopped Buterin from writing about encryption. In September 2011, Mihai Alisie, a Romanian digital asset enthusiast, contacted him. Alisie, Vitalik and three other entrepreneurs co-founded Bitcoin Magazine.
As lead writer, Vitalik spent 10-20 hours a week during college writing articles for the publication, which launched in 2012 as an online and print magazine dedicated to Bitcoin. Bitcoin Magazine, considered by many to be the first media outlet dedicated to crypto topics, he and his partners sold to BTC Media LLC in January 2015 for an undisclosed price.
But before that, Buterin came into contact with Ripple, a blockchain project focused on global payments, in 2013, and looked for internship opportunities under the company's project. However, despite Ripple Labs’ decision to hire Vitalik, the company had only existed for nine months at the time and failed to meet the regulatory requirement for at least a year to sponsor Buterin’s visa in the United States.
Start and Guide Ethereum's Crypto Journey
Potential job opportunities at Bitcoin Magazine and Ripple aren't Vitalik's only plans for the crypto world. Due to his active involvement in the BTC space, Buterin discovered the limitations of cryptocurrency scripting languages.
He later reached out to Bitcoin Core developers about the issue, saying that the industry needs other applications besides money, and a more powerful language for application development that could even be used to transfer real-world assets such as real estate and stocks to Bitcoin. blockchain.
After contributing to the Colored Coins and Mastercoin projects built on top of the Bitcoin network, Buterin decided to create a different platform than Bitcoin. So he began to study the concept of Ethereum.
In short, while its core foundation is largely inspired by Bitcoin, Ethereum leverages a Turing-complete programming language (a language that allows machines to solve any problem given enough resources) to generalize the platform and replace it with Specialized functionality provided by other projects.
Ripple is focused on facilitating cheap and fast cross-border payments, Bitcoin is centered around the concept of a decentralized currency, and developers can build all kinds of applications directly on the Ethereum main chain, from virtual cat-themed collectibles and blockchain From chain games to digital identity and tokenized assets platform.
On November 27, 2013, Buterin created the Ethereum white paper, which described the smart contract blockchain concept he envisioned. Initially, he only shared the document with his fellow travelers, who sent it to more community members.
Interestingly, Vitalik had expected severe criticism from professional cryptographers, but initial feedback on Ethereum's core philosophy was overwhelmingly positive. From December 2013 to early 2014, he formally founded the project with a number of people, including:
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson
Mihai Alisie
Gavin Wood, Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies
Anthony Di Iorio, founder and CEO of Decentral
Joseph Lubin, Founder and CEO, ConsenSys
Jeffrey Wilcke of Mastercoin
In January 2014, Buterin officially launched Ethereum at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami. He described the project as a global computer running on a decentralized, permissionless blockchain network. Buterin also elaborated on potential use cases ranging from decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to crop insurance. Incidentally, these later became reality (even crop insurance).
After officially kicking things off and creating the Ethereum Foundation nonprofit to manage the project, Vitalik and the team decided to hold an ICO between July and August 2014, collecting over 31,500 tokens worth $18 million from investors Bitcoin to start development.
Finally, after the May 2015 testnet launch, Ethereum mined its genesis block in July 2015 via the platform's early Frontier.
Later, the developers introduced more features in several upgrades. One notable event in Ethereum history was the DAO hack, in which a hacker exploited a flaw in the decentralized autonomous organization's code to steal $70 million of the $150 million in development funding the project had received.
To fix the problem, developers (including Vitalik Buterin) agreed to initiate a hard fork (a software upgrade that is incompatible with previous versions) to fix bugs and recover funds stolen by perpetrators by modifying records on the distributed ledger. While the upgrade was successful, it split the ethereum community, with some opposing the changes, stating that "code is law" and that the blockchain should remain unchanged.
Those who hold this view still use the old, unchanged chain called Ethereum Classic (ETC), while the majority of the community adopted the upgrade and moved to the new Ethereum blockchain.
Throughout the history of Ethereum, the smart contract blockchain that Vitalik co-founded was an important platform for cryptocurrency trends, including:
Early dApps
The ICO Boom of 2017
The Rise of the DeFi Space
NFT boom
The Play and Earn Revolution in Blockchain Gaming
Over the past few months, Vitalik and ethereum developers have been focusing on improving the scalability of the blockchain network, a problem that arises in order to achieve higher levels of ecosystem decentralization and security.
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current activity
Without a doubt, Ethereum is Vitalik's most important project so far, and he has been very active in the Ethereum community.
In addition to core development of the smart contract blockchain (e.g. ETH 2.0 upgrade, sharding, layer 2 scalability solutions), Vitalik is also working on several technology initiatives for the Ethereum ecosystem and the crypto industry more broadly, concept and innovation.
Quadratic public goods financing via Gitcoin is a good example. In short, quadratic financing is a newer, more efficient way of financing public goods, best described as nonrivalrous goods and services accessible to everyone, ranging from clean air and street lighting to open-source software and national healthcare. Gitcoin is a platform that helps fund public goods projects within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Interestingly, Buterin co-published the research paper in September 2018, in which he proposed the quadratic financing model with Harvard economics PhD candidate Zoë Hitzig and Microsoft researcher E. Glen Weyl, developing the quadratic voting formula, This is also the basis of the company's new mechanism.
Quadratic voting has been used in many instances to optimize democratic decision-making and governance, and the quadratic funding model advocated by Buterin and used by Gitcoin can incentivize value creation. It also helps raise and allocate funds for Web3 projects more efficiently.
In early 2018, Vitalik co-authored another article with Weyl, "Liberation Through Radical Decentralization," in which the pair described and highlighted commonalities in their thinking to address some of today's most important social and financial problems.
In the manifesto, Buterin focuses on reducing the authority of powerful monopolies and centralized corporations through decentralized technology. At the same time, Weyl found a solution in a concept called "radical markets" to improve the efficiency of democracy by designing and implementing rules such as quadratic voting to break and reduce the need for centralized authority.
Many in the crypto community consider Vitalik the "King of Philosophers" due to his work on the aforementioned concepts and his involvement in the development of blockchain technology solutions. Although, he prefers to be called a "philosopher of technology" because he doesn't want to choose between technology and philosophy.
Buterin is not afraid to share his views on controversial topics, often at odds with the views of the majority of digital asset industry players.
For example, he believes that the upcoming crypto winter will do more good for the project than harm. Back in December 2017, he said that the bullish trend that brought market capitalization growth to $500 billion was unsustainable and industry players were not "earning".
Additionally, he shared his “unpopular opinion” on Reddit, where he criticized the Salvadoran government for forcing businesses to accept Bitcoin, stating the exact opposite of the idea of freedom that “is so important to the crypto space.”
He recently made headlines for his harsh criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he was deeply troubled by "Putin's decision to abandon a peaceful resolution of the Russia-Ukraine dispute in favor of war." After calling it a "crime against the people of Ukraine and Russia," Buterin later posted a tweet adding that "Ethereum is neutral, but I am not."
Vitalik has been very active in supporting conflict-related initiatives, including promoting the Ukrainian DAO decentralized charity project on his Twitter feed.
When it comes to giving, Buterin has supported a number of causes, donating more than his current estimated net worth of $1 billion — about $1.5 billion — to charitable organizations. Recipients include Human Life Extension Program SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation and India's Crypto Covid Relief Fund.
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Vitalik Buterin: Co-Founder of Ethereum and Tech Philosopher of Crypto
There is no doubt that Vitalik Buterin is one of the most important and influential figures in the cryptocurrency industry.
As the mastermind behind Ethereum, Vitalik is very active in the field, constantly developing, collaborating and supporting new initiatives, concepts and projects, and sharing his views on various topics related to crypto, technology, society and economy.
Additionally, he is a major proponent of decentralization, blockchain technology, and cryptocurrencies, and their real-world implementations to solve some of the most important problems in modern human society.
About AAX Academy
About AAX Academy
AAX serves trading users, innovators, NFT artists, high-net-worth investors and users without bank accounts around the world. With the mission of realizing the practical application of digital assets, AAX is committed to making stable currency benefit everyone.
AAX Academy is a user education channel created by AAX, which aims to help more users learn novice tutorials and understand the basics of blockchain.
AAX serves trading users, innovators, NFT artists, high-net-worth investors and users without bank accounts around the world. With the mission of realizing the practical application of digital assets, AAX is committed to making stable currency benefit everyone.
