Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer who created Ethereum, the world’s second-most valuable cryptocurrency network behind Bitcoin. Buterin was born in Russia and raised in Toronto, where he was recognized as mathematically gifted at a young age. In 2011 at 17, he learned about Bitcoin from his computer-scientist father and started earning Bitcoin himself by writing about cryptocurrency for specialty blogs and scholarly journals. A year later he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, the first serious publication about cryptocurrency. Buterin was a shy idealist who was able to look past Bitcoin’s market volatility and imagine how the decentralizing potential of the technology could apply to more than banking. In 2013, he published a white paper describing how blockchain could be an enabling platform for all kinds of autonomous software such as "smart contracts" which self-execute. He proposed a blockchain called Ethereum, a ubiquitous "decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference." Buterin and Ethereum's coders are working to scale it, with the goal of enabling thousands of fast and secure transactions but also an entire ecosystem of decentralized applications.