Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin (born on January 31, 1994, Kolomna, Russia) – Canadian-Russian programmer, co-founder and former editor of the Bitcoin Magazine printed magazine, co-founder of the Ethereum project.

Biography

He was born in Russia, grew up in Canada, where he moved with his parents at the age of six, speaks Russian, English and Chinese. He lived in Zug, Switzerland for three years and moved to Singapore in 2017. He dropped out of University at Waterloo to work on blockchain projects.

Buterin became interested in bitcoin in 2011, and in the same year became a co-founder of the magazine “Bitcoin Magazine”. In 2012, Bitcoin Magazine began to be published as a printed publication and became the first major printed publication on this topic. He also holds a position in the first peer-reviewed scientific journal Ledger, dedicated to cryptocurrencies and related topics.

Prior to joining Ethereum, he also worked on various open-source projects related to Bitcoin.

In may 2016, he came to Russia for the first time since he moved with his parents to Canada in 2001. During his visit he met with Russian Ministers and representatives of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation.

In 2017 Vitalik Buterin entered the top 10 of the rating “40 most influential young people under 40 years” according to Fortune magazine, got into the rating of 600 brightest people under 30 years of Forbes magazine, Vedomosti newspaper recognized him as a professional of the year.

Vitalik is an active user of Twitter social network, he has a bit less than 800k followers. His net worth is estimated at 400-500 million US dollars.

Charity

The extension of human life. Vitalik donated $ 2.4 million to SENS Research Foundation in 2018 for research in the field of biotechnologies of rejuvenation and prolongation of human life.

Bitcoin Magazine

Communicating on the forum about Bitcoin, Buterin came across an offer. Five bitcoins (about $ 3.50) for an article about bitcoin. As a result, Buterin started writing for this site and he was published there until the site was closed due to lack of interest in this topic.

In 2011, Vitalik received an offer to become a co-founder and lead author of Bitcoin Magazine. Later, Buterin also began to be published in other periodicals, including Bitcoin Weekly.

Since 2012 Bitcoin Magazine has been published in printed version. Later, the magazine was bought by BTC Media, where Buterin continued to write until the middle of 2014. In addition, he was in the editorial board of the Ledger magazine, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which publishes articles highlighting issues of cryptocurrency and blockchain-technology.

Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum

Buterin is the creator of the Ethereum system, a platform for creating blockchain-based decentralized online services, working on the basis of smart contracts. The network was launched in late July 2015.

Ethereum is realized as a single decentralized virtual machine. As an open source platform, Ethereum greatly simplifies the implementation of blockchain technology. The Ethereum technology allows any transactions with any assets based on a distributed base of contracts such as blockchain to be registered without resorting to traditional legal procedures. This possibility is competitive with respect to the existing transaction registration system.

DAICO

DAICO is an improved model of raising funds before the ICO, which includes some aspects of the DAO. The concept was proposed by Vitalik Buterin in January 2018 and is aimed at making ICO safer by involving investors in the initial development of the project.

The DAICO contract has a mechanism in which participants can send funds to the project in exchange for network tokens. When the period of the crowdsale ends, the contract prohibits someone from doing additional actions, that is, the usual sale of tokens.

In the contract, there is another variable, which means the amount that developers can take from the general fund of raised funds. Initially, this share is zero, but the members of the crowdsale can then vote to increase it. Voting will also allow the owners of the tokens to make a decision on reimbursement of the funds made if they are dissatisfied with the progress of the project implementation.

Open-source platform

Among other projects implemented by Vitalik on the basis of open source there are: Cryptokite, pybitcointools and btckeysplit. In addition, he contributed to the Bitcoin Python libraries, as well as to the Egora crypto currency trading site.