Born 1994 in Kolomna, Russia. Emigrated with his family to Canada at six. At seventeen he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine; at nineteen he dropped out of university to build Ethereum, arguing that Bitcoin's scripting language was too narrow for what programmable money could be.
Ethereum launched in July 2015. By the end of the decade it was the settlement layer for most of DeFi, most of NFTs, and most of the experimental economic systems being built online. Buterin remained its public conscience — writing essays on governance, credibility, and public goods that are read as carefully as the protocol's code.
He holds no operational role, draws no salary, and has given away hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tokens to longevity research and pandemic relief. The rarest kind of founder: the one who tried to make himself unnecessary.
Ethereum Whitepaper
Vitalik Buterin's 2014 vision for a world computer — extending Bitcoin with Turing-complete scripting to enable any decentralised application.
Vitalik Buterin's Blog
The Ethereum founder's essays on cryptography, governance, and the future of decentralized systems. Essential reading.