Vitalik Buterin is a Canadian-Russian software developer and author. He is mainly known as the co-founder and conceptual inventor of Ethereum.
At the age of 17, Buterin learned details about how Bitcoin works from his father. In 2012, he was awarded the bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Computer Science. In 2013 he traveled to various developers and programmers to discuss the blockchain technology with them. Later that year, he returned to Toronto, where he published a white paper that included the concept of Ethereum.
Buterin first attended the University of Waterloo and dropped out of his studies in 2014 when he received a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Fellowship to pursue his vision of Ethereum full-time. In 2018, he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Basel.
