Vitalik Buterin is a 23-year-old Canadian-Russian programmer, co-founder of one of the largest crypto-exchange projects Ethereum and well-known Bitcoin Magazine was born in Russia. His father - a programmer - since childhood, introduced computers and programming to his son and inflamed his mind with that. In late 1999, Vitalik’s family emigrated to Canada, then he lived in Switzerland, and is now in Singapore, where not so long ago, opened the office of the Ethereum project.
Vitalik became interested in bitcoin at the age of 17. He began to study the cryptocurrency and work in this direction, for this he even dropped out of the university. Vitalik wrote articles on cryptocurrencies on the internet forum, where authors were paid in it. In such a way he got his first five bitcoins, which were about four dollars at the rate of that time. Through this work Buterin took an ideal position to monitor the development of new technologies, the potential of which almost no one knew in the world. He saw obvious flaws in bitcoin system, so he wanted to create his own perfect platform. He began to engage in various open source projects, to issue Bitcoin Magazine as a printed mass media. Soon the magazine became the first major print media on cryptocurrencies.
In 2015, Vitalik, together with his colleagues at the magazine, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, and programmer Gavin Wood, launched their own blockchain platform to create decentralized online services based on smart contracts - Ethereum. The internal currency of the platform is ether (ETH). Ethereum technology allows to register any transactions with any assets based on a distributed base of contracts in the blockchain without resorting to traditional legal procedures. This possibility is competitive in comparison with the existing contracts registration system. Such a contract cannot be broken, circumvented or canceled. The network is decentralized: remittances are not controlled nor by banks or other organizations. The open platform code allows developers to create their own applications (DApps) and improve the technology of the blockchain.
During the first 42 days of trading, Ethereum sold ethers in the amount of 31 thousand bitcoins - one of the largest ICOs at that time. Thanks to Ethereum, Vitalik and his team were awarded the prestigious World Technology Award. They even moved ahead of Mark Zuckerberg. In addition, the team received a grant of $ 100,000 to implement the project.
June 2, 2017 Vitalik personally met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He told the president about the technology of blockchain and its advantages.
Buterin is on the list of the most influential people on the planet, according to the Bloomberg Agency, as well as in the ‘30 under 30’ list issued by Forbes magazine. In his 23 years, Vitalik achieved a high result in programming, especially because he was inspired by the idea that several thousand people around the world, the same as he, using computers, can themselves create an independent financial network.