Vitalik Buterin: The Prodigy Who Built Ethereum

In May 2021 the people behind Shiba Inu, a joke cryptocurrency with a dog on it, sent half of all their tokens to Vitalik Buterin's public wallet. It was a marketing stunt: if the creator of Ethereum held the coin, it would look respectable. On paper the gift was worth billions. Within days Buterin had given tokens worth more than $1 billion to a Covid relief fund in India and destroyed most of the rest, about 410 trillion tokens, by sending them to an address nobody can open. He said he did not want to be the keeper of that much power over someone else's coin.

It is the story people tell about him because it fits. Buterin is a 32-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer who designed the second-biggest cryptocurrency network in the world at 19, launched it at 21 and has spent the decade since writing long, careful essays about how to make it safer. In an industry full of founders who ended in court, he is the rare one who reads as a hero. He is not without critics.

The teenager and the bitcoin blog

Buterin was born in Kolomna, near Moscow, on 31 January 1994, and moved to Canada with his family at six. In 2011, aged 17, he heard about bitcoin from his father, Dmitry, a computer scientist. He started writing about it for a blog that paid him in bitcoin, about five coins an article, and soon helped found Bitcoin Magazine, one of the first publications about the subject.

Writing about bitcoin made him see its limits. Bitcoin is a shared public ledger, a record of who owns what that thousands of computers keep in step, with no bank in the middle. But it does essentially one thing: move coins from one owner to another. In late 2013 Buterin, then 19, published a paper describing a different design. Ethereum would be a ledger that could also run programs. In 2014 he left the University of Waterloo with a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Fellowship, the programme run by the investor Peter Thiel that pays young people to leave college and build things.

The world computer

The programs are called smart contracts: code that holds and moves money by itself according to rules written in advance, like a vending machine that takes the coin and releases the drink without a shopkeeper. On Ethereum, anyone could write one, and nobody could stop it running once it was live.

Buterin assembled a team of co-founders, among them the programmer Gavin Wood, the banker-turned-entrepreneur Joseph Lubin and Charles Hoskinson, who later started Cardano. In 2014 a public sale of ether, Ethereum's coin, raised about $18 million. The network went live on 30 July 2015. Buterin was 21.

What followed changed crypto. Smart contracts made it cheap to create new tokens, which fed the 2017 boom in ICOs, initial coin offerings, where projects sold their own coins to the public much like an unregulated share issue. They made DeFi possible, short for decentralised finance: lending, borrowing and trading run by code instead of banks. They made NFTs possible, tokens that act as a certificate of ownership for a picture or a game item. Almost every crypto boom and many crypto disasters since 2016 ran on Ethereum or on networks that copy it.

The hard calls

The first crisis came early. In 2016 a project called The DAO, an investment fund run by smart contract in which holders voted on spending like shareholders, raised about $150 million in ether. In June an attacker used a bug to drain about $60 million of it. Buterin backed a hard fork, a change to Ethereum's rules that rewrote the record to give the money back, much as if a stock exchange cancelled a batch of fraudulent trades. It went live on 20 July 2016. A minority refused on principle, arguing that the ledger should never be edited, and kept the old version running as Ethereum Classic. The argument about whether that was right has never quite ended.

The second was the move from mining to staking. Ethereum, like bitcoin, was secured by proof of work: computers competing to solve puzzles, burning electricity to earn the right to add the next page to the ledger. Buterin pushed for years for proof of stake, in which holders lock up coins as a deposit that they lose if they cheat, like a bond posted by a security guard. The switch, called the Merge, happened on 15 September 2022 and cut Ethereum's energy use by about 99.95 percent, according to the Ethereum Foundation. Miners who had invested in equipment lost their business overnight.

He has also taken sides outside crypto. He condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and gave to Ukrainian relief. Of the Shiba Inu money, the Indian fund, CryptoRelief, could only sell the tokens slowly, and in January 2022 it returned about $100 million to Buterin, who put it into Balvi, a fund he set up to back Covid research.

The critics, and 2026

The criticism is mostly about power. Buterin holds no formal control over Ethereum, but his essays steer its plans, and the Ethereum Foundation, the Swiss non-profit he co-founded, funds much of the work. Critics have long complained that the foundation sells ether to pay its bills, weighing on the price, and that Ethereum is too slow to compete with rivals such as Solana.

In 2026 those complaints came to a head. In January Buterin withdrew 16,384 ether, about $43 million, from his own holdings to fund open-source security and privacy projects as the foundation entered what he called "mild austerity". At least eight senior figures left the foundation by May. On 23 June he announced that it would cut its budget by about 40 percent and move to a leaner model in which it spends a far smaller share of its savings each year; the same day it confirmed a 20 percent cut in staff, and its co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang had stepped down days before. In October he warned that advances in AI could one day weaken the maths that locks crypto wallets, while telling people not to rush to move their funds.

He still dresses as if nobody told him he was rich, still writes most of his ideas down in public, and still answers critics with arguments rather than insults. In crypto, that is enough to make him a hero.