Camila Russo studied journalism at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile before completing a Master of Science at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She began her career writing international news for El Mercurio, Chile's largest national newspaper, winning first place for online journalism from Brazil's exchange operator BM&F Bovespa. She then joined Bloomberg News, spending eight years reporting on emerging markets from Buenos Aires, European stocks from Madrid, and macro movements from New York — a cross-market grounding that positioned her, by 2017, as the outlet's first journalist to cover cryptocurrency as a daily beat.
Reporting on Argentina's recurring economic crises had sharpened her interest in Bitcoin as an alternative store of value, and daily crypto coverage deepened her focus on Ethereum. When Bloomberg declined her proposal to launch a dedicated crypto team, Russo left to write The Infinite Machine (HarperCollins, 2020), the first book-length account of Ethereum's founding. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews, it traced Vitalik Buterin's conception of the platform and followed the coalition of coders who built it through speculative frenzy, regulatory scrutiny, and internal conflict.
Before publication, Russo had already founded The Defiant — a media platform covering decentralised finance, launched in June 2019. It grew into a multi-channel company publishing news, analysis, and a podcast for readers navigating the DeFi space. She has continued as its founder and chief executive. The Infinite Machine remains the primary journalistic record of Ethereum's early years, and The Defiant continues to document the ecosystem the book introduced to a wider audience.
The Infinite Machine
The definitive story of Ethereum's creation — Vitalik Buterin, the early contributors, and how a teenager's white paper became programmable money. The most human account of how a world-changing protocol was born.