Share this article
Who Created the Ethereum Ecosystem?
The crypto industry's most used crypto project was designed and created by a Canadian-Russian programmer when he was just 19 years old.
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 12:30 p.m. Published Mar 23, 2021, 12:55 p.m.
Make us preferred on Google
Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian entrepreneur and programmer from Toronto, envisioned second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum when he was 19 years old.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
In 2011, the year Buterin first grew interested in Bitcoin, Buterin co-founded the online news website Bitcoin Magazine, writing hundreds of articles on the cryptocurrency world. He went on to code for the privacy-minded Dark Wallet and the marketplace Egora.
Along this journey, he came up with the idea for the Ethereum ecosystem, a platform inspired by Bitcoin that could go beyond the financial use cases.
He released a white paper in 2013 describing an alternative platform designed for any type of decentralized application developers would want to build. Many developers were drawn to this idea of creating decentralized applications because they would be accessible to a global audience, be free from censorship and would give users more control over their data than most apps, which have intermediaries in the middle managing users' finances and data.
To accomplish this, Ethereum makes it easy to create smart contracts, or code that automatically creates an outcome when certain conditions are met.
For his work, Buterin was named a 2014 Thiel fellow, winning a $100,000 grant to work on Ethereum.
Buterin FAQs
Who helped Buterin create Ethereum?
After Buterin unveiled the Ethereum white paper, several other developers joined the ranks including CEO of IOG Charles Hoskinson, Decentral CEO Anthony Di Iorio and Akasha Founder Mihai Alisie. Buterin also introduced two new co-founders to the team:
- Co-founder Dr. Gavin Wood did much of the early programming and architecting of the platform. He wrote the Ethereum yellow paper, the “technical bible” that outlines the specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is responsible for handling the state of the ledger and runs smart contracts.
- Co-founder Joseph Lubin went on to found the Brooklyn-based ConsenSys, a startup that focuses on building decentralized apps.
How much money does Buterin have?
Since Ethereum data and transaction information is public, users can track how much money Buterin has stored in ether, Ethereum's native token.
Buterin's main address is this one, which shows that he owns 333,348 ether, worth approximately $568 million at the time this article was published.
What was Ethereum like in its early days?
To get the project off the ground, Buterin and the other founders launched a crowdfunding campaign in July 2014 where participants purchased ether, the Ethereum tokens that function as shares in the project.
Raising more than $18 million, it was the most successful crowd sale at that time. It took another year, but the first live release, Frontier, launched on 30th July, 2015. It wasn’t a particularly attractive platform, but the command line interface offered developers a platform for creating their own decentralized apps.
The smart contract platform took off, swelling into today’s ecosystem of hundreds of developers and even drawing the attention of tech giants like IBM and Microsoft.
The funds from Ethereum’s initial $18 million crowd sale and project development are now managed by the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit entity based in Zug, Switzerland.
More For You
Pudgy Penguins is building a multi-vertical consumer IP platform — combining phygital products, games, NFTs and PENGU to monetize culture at scale.
What to know:
Pudgy Penguins is emerging as one of the strongest NFT-native brands of this cycle, shifting from speculative “digital luxury goods” into a multi-vertical consumer IP platform. Its strategy is to acquire users through mainstream channels first; toys, retail partnerships and viral media, then onboard them into Web3 through games, NFTs and the PENGU token.
The ecosystem now spans phygital products (> $13M retail sales and >1M units sold), games and experiences (Pudgy Party surpassed 500k downloads in two weeks), and a widely distributed token (airdropped to 6M+ wallets). While the market is currently pricing Pudgy at a premium relative to traditional IP peers, sustained success depends on execution across retail expansion, gaming adoption and deeper token utility.
More For You
HYPE token surges 24% as silver futures volume soars on Hyperliquid exchange
Silver futures on the crypto derivatives exchange are currently showing $1.25 billion in volume and $155 million in open interest.
What to know:
- HYPE, the native token of the Hyperliquid derivatives exchange, jumped 24% in 24 hours as trading in silver, gold and other commodities surged.
- Silver perpetual futures on Hyperliquid became the platform’s third most active market during Asia hours.
- Because trading fees from user-created markets are used largely to buy back HYPE on the open market, the spike in commodity activity is fueling demand for the token and signaling broader growth for Hyperliquid.
Top Stories
