Vitalik Buterin proposed Ethereum in late 2013, when he was nineteen years old. A Russian-Canadian programmer who had been writing for Bitcoin Magazine and contributing to colored-coins and Mastercoin projects, Buterin had grown frustrated with Bitcoin’s limited scripting capabilities. His whitepaper described a “world computer” — a blockchain with a Turing-complete virtual machine that could execute arbitrary programs, not just simple transactions.
Ethereum launched on July 30, 2015. Eight cofounders were involved, including Gavin Wood (who wrote the Solidity language and Yellow Paper), Joseph Lubin (who later founded ConsenSys), Charles Hoskinson (who left to build Cardano), and others. The founding team dynamics were complicated and sometimes acrimonious, but the product shipped and changed everything.
What followed was the most consequential software launch in crypto history after Bitcoin. ICOs in 2017. DeFi Summer in 2020. NFTs in 2021. Each wave ran on Ethereum’s infrastructure. The Merge to Proof of Stake in September 2022 was the most complex live-protocol upgrade in blockchain history, eliminating 99.95% of Ethereum’s energy consumption overnight. EIP-1559 made ETH deflationary during high-usage periods.
Buterin himself became one of the most unusual public figures in technology — a skinny, socially awkward genius who donated billions to charity, blogged about mechanism design on his personal website, and refused to become a corporate CEO. His influence on Ethereum governance is enormous but informal; he leads through writing and research rather than authority. Whether Ethereum maintains its position as the dominant smart-contract platform through the L2 era depends on thousands of developers, but the architecture they’re building on still traces back to a whitepaper written by a teenager in 2013.
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