Vitalik Buterin is one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain and its related cryptocurrency, Ether. Born in Russia in 1994, Buterin moved to Canada as a child where he excelled academically. Buterin’s dive into crypto began in the industry’s early years, when he took an interest in Bitcoin in 2011.
Buterin co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 and went on to craft the concept for Ethereum, publicizing a white paper detailing the new blockchain in 2013. Buterin saw a need for a blockchain with more versatility than Bitcoin, and he fulfilled that void with Ethereum.
The Ethereum blockchain launched in 2015, with Ether subsequently cementing itself as the crypto industry’s second-largest crypto asset based on market capitalization. Although Buterin brought Ethereum’s white paper to life, a number of other minds helped in co-founding the project and bringing it to launch.
Buterin has remained involved in the Ethereum community over the years, standing as a significant figure in terms of Ethereum development, as well as the broader crypto sector.
With Ethereum’s step-up to Ethereum 2.0, Buterin had a busy 2021. Ethereum’s Beacon Chain launched in December 2020, marking the official beginning of the blockchain’s transition. Ethereum 2.0 represents a transition of the original Ethereum blockchain — a proof-of-work network — to a proof-of-stake protocol. The move aims to help Ethereum scale and reach its other goals.
Ethereum made a notable amount of noise in 2021. The Ethereum blockchain hosted a significant amount of NFT and DeFi activity, but in turn required high transaction fees at times, as it was burdened by the unprecedented level of network activity.
The Ethereum blockchain went through its London hard fork in August. The London fork brought in multiple Ethereum Improvement Proposals, including EIP-1559, which added an Ether burn metric to transactions, which has the potential to make the token a deflationary asset.
Buterin received 500 trillion Shiba Inu tokens from the project’s pseudonymous founder, Ryoshi. Buterin subsequently donated 50.7 trillion SHIB, worth approximately $1 billion, to the India COVID-19 Relief Fund, and burned another 410.24 trillion.
Given Ethereum’s presence in the crypto space, Ethereum 2.0 has naturally arisen as a notable point of interest amid the blockchain’s difficulties.
In December 2021, Buterin published a writeup titled “Endgame” talking about a potential route Ethereum 2.0 could take. Buterin noted the potential for lessened decentralization as a tradeoff for increased scalability via rollups.
Ethereum 2.0 is more of a journey than a single event, and Buterin is expected to be part of that process every step of the way. The Ethereum 2.0 move spanned all of 2021, with 2022 likely to see further movement toward the new protocol. Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0 are estimated to combine in 2022 in a process called the Merge, but both networks are set to remain operational for a period of time.
If Ethereum 2.0 ultimately results in heightened scalability, one might wonder about the potentially positive effects it could bring to the Ethereum-heavy DeFi and NFT sectors.
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Kolumna, Russia
Developers, Founder, Tech
University of Waterloo, Computer Science
Ethereum, Ethereum 2.0