Just four years after the launch of Bitcoin, a 19-year old boy set out to change the entire fintech landscape. Today he is the mastermind behind a business worth an astonishing amount of $47,366,763,068, after dropping out from the University of Waterloo.
The person is Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum. He first discovered blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies through Bitcoin in 2011 and was immediately excited by the technology and its potential. He co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in September 2011, and after two and a half years of looking at what the existing blockchain technology and applications had to offer, wrote the Ethereum white paper in November 2013. He now leads Ethereum’s research team, working on future versions of the Ethereum protocol.
His twitter handles ‘Vitalik “Not giving away ETH” Buterin’ makes it blatantly clear that he’s not about to hand out any ETH. In July 2018, he made an appearance at the TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain, where he mentioned at multiple occasions the difficulties of residing in a world where things are either centralised or decentralised.
At the conference, he also expressed his distaste for centralised exchanges saying that they could “go burn in hell as much as possible.” According to Vitalik, projects should not have to pay over $10-15 million in listing fees to have people trade tokens on centralising exchanges.
This Russian-Canadian writer and programmer is one of the most prominent and influential people in the crypto space. Besides being a person with an outstanding intellect, he has notably donated over $2.4 million in Ethereum to the SENS Research Foundation which is the international anti-ageing research foundation.
In a recent OmiseGP AMA session, Buterin disclosed that Ethereum would eventually be able to process 1 million transactions per second and maybe better, 100 million transactions per second.
