Vitalik Buterin, the world’s youngest known crypto billionaire and the co-founder of the Ethereum crypto network recently donated over $1.14 billion (₹8,360,081,700,000 approx) worth of meme coins to India’s Covid-19 relief fund and other charities to help the country battle the second wave of the ongoing pandemic.
So, who is Vitalik Buterin and what do we know about him?
Before we dig any further let’s learn a little more about Buterin’s childhood and how he developed an interest in cryptocurrency. Shall we?
When Buterin was in third grade he was put into a class for gifted children and that’s where he developed an interest in mathematics, programming, and economics. At the age of 17, his father taught him about Bitcoin and his curiosity to learn more grew stronger.
After completing high school, Buterin took advanced courses and worked as a research assistant for cryptographer Ian Goldberg, who co-created Off-the-Record Messaging and was the former board of directors chairman of the Tor Project.
In 2011, Buterin also started writing for a publication called Bitcoin Weekly. He co-created Bitcoin Magazine with Mihai Alisie and worked as a senior writer until 2014.
In 2012, Buterin also won a bronze medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics. A year later, he returned to Canada and published a white paper proposing Ethereum.
He was granted $100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship (a scholarship created by venture capitalist Peter Thiel) and he dropped out of college. He accepted the fellowship and started work on Ethereum full-time.
He was named in Fortune 40 under 40 list in 2016, Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2018 and he also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel in 2018.
In 2018, he also made a donation of $2.4 million of Ether to the SENS Research Foundation for research on rejuvenation biotechnologies and human life extension.
Today, Ethereum has grown to become the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency platform after Bitcoin.
