Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer best known as a co-founder of Ethereum. He has helped shape its technical development and public vision.

Connect

Gavin Wood: A British computer scientist who co-founded Ethereum and wrote its original technical specification. Wood collaborated on Ethereum’s early design and translated its ideas into a formal specification.
Ethereum: A blockchain platform that executes smart contracts and supports decentralized applications. Ethereum is the network Buterin co-founded and continues to help guide.
Bitcoin Magazine: A publication about Bitcoin and digital currencies, co-founded by Vitalik Buterin and Mihai Alisie in 2011. Buterin’s writing for the magazine preceded his proposal for Ethereum.
Ethereum roadmap: A set of planned protocol changes intended to improve Ethereum’s scalability, security, and usability. Buterin’s proposals and explanations have helped shape discussion of Ethereum’s planned upgrades.
Joseph Lubin: A Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded Ethereum and later founded ConsenSys. Lubin helped establish Ethereum and built a company around its ecosystem.
Ethereum Virtual Machine: The runtime environment that executes smart-contract code on Ethereum. The virtual machine implements Ethereum’s general-purpose computation, central to Buterin’s original proposal.
Bitcoin: A decentralized digital currency whose transactions are recorded on a proof-of-work blockchain. Buterin’s experience with Bitcoin exposed the limits of building applications on a currency-focused protocol.
Ethereum governance: The social and technical processes through which Ethereum participants coordinate protocol changes. Buterin’s influence illustrates how proposals and public argument matter without a single formal ruler.
Charles Hoskinson: An American entrepreneur who co-founded Ethereum and later founded Input Output Global. Hoskinson participated in Ethereum’s founding before pursuing a different blockchain project.
Proof of stake: A blockchain consensus method in which participants validate blocks by committing cryptocurrency as stake. Buterin advocated proof of stake as Ethereum’s alternative to energy-intensive mining.