Who is Vitalik Buterin?

By Rachel Jacobs
Published Mar 26, 2015 and Updated Mar 21st, 2023
Who is Vitalik Buterin?

Vitalik Buterin, one of the younger personalities in the Bitcoin space, was born in Russia in 1994 and moved to Canada in 2000. Buterin became interested in Bitcoin in 2011, and soon after became cofounder and head writer of Bitcoin Magazine. In 2013 Buterin left university to work on cryptocurrency, as a writer and software developer. In 2014 Buterin co-founded Ethereum, which acts as both a software development platform and a decentralized mining network.

Though he is still quite young, Vitalik Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship award, to further his work in cryptocurrency and software development, and he is a winner of the World Technology Award in the field of IT Software in 2014.

In July 2017, fake reports emerged that the Ethereum founder Vitali Buterin had died in a car accident. This was quickly debunked, with Buterin taking to Twitter to prove he was still alive and counting blocks. 

“Cryptocurrency Protocols Are Like Onions… One common design philosophy among many cryptocurrency 2.0 protocols is the idea that, just like the internet, cryptocurrency design would work best if protocols split off into different layers. Under this strain of thought, Bitcoin is to be thought of as a sort of TCP/IP of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and other next-generation protocols can be built on top of Bitcoin much like we have SMTP for email, HTTP for webpages and XMPP for chat all on top of TCP as a common underlying data layer.”
– Vitalik Buterin 
(Read more Cryptocurrency quotes like this)

Watch: Vitalik Buterin explains Ethereum in three minutes.