Buterin was born in the Russian city of Kolomna in 1994. He eventually moved to Toronto with his family, where he grew up. After receiving a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, he briefly attended the University of Waterloo before dropping out. This young man became enamoured with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets after receiving his first computer.
He was a mathematical genius, perhaps a tad too bright for his contemporaries. He eventually dropped out to tour the world, meeting crypto aficionados in different places, and discovering his true calling. Buterin came up with the design of Ethereum (the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin) in a white paper when he was 19 years old.
The 27-year-old co-creator of Ethereum is now the world’s youngest crypto billionaire. Early Monday morning, Ethereum’s cryptocurrency, ether, surpassed $3,000 for the first time, marking a 325 percent increase since the start of the year. He currently owns 333,000 Ether coins, which are presently valued at $1.029 billion. The ether cryptocurrency has a market capitalization of $376 billion, second only to bitcoin, which has a market capitalization of $1.08 trillion.
Buterin, who presently resides in Singapore, told Wired: ‘I considered everything to do with either government regulation or corporate control as just plain bad.’ And I assumed that people at those institutions were like Mr. Burns (from The Simpsons) who sat behind their desks and said, “Excellent.” How am I going to screw a thousand people this time?’
