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Who is Vitalik Buterin? Ethereum co-founder donates cryptocurrency worth $1.5B to India's Covid relief fund

Buterin, who is worth $21 billion, became the youngest crypto billionaire last month. A part of that came as a publiclity stunt by developers, who sent him another currency - SHIB
UPDATED MAY 13, 2021
Founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin made a $1.5 million charitable donation to India's Covid-19 relief fund (Getty Images)
Founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin made a $1.5 million charitable donation to India's Covid-19 relief fund (Getty Images)

India's Covid-19 crisis has caught international attention, with relief and donations being sent to the country from all corners of the world. The latest to contribute is Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of Ethereum. Buterin has donated crypto worth $1.5 billion to the India Covid-Crypto Relief Fund. 

The transaction wasn't without consequence - for crypto investors. Buterin donated 500 ETH (Ethereum) and over 50 trillion SHIB (Shiba Inu). The latter is a 'meme coin', a cryptocurrency that isn't widely popular yet. Buterin's donation saw the value of Shiba Inu drop by nearly 35%, putting it effectively in the doghouse. But the real story here is how Buterin ended up with so much crypto in the first place. As the creator of Ethereum, he holds quite a bit of that currency, but that's not what put his net worth at $21 billion. To understand how he amassed so much wealth, we need to dive into the story of Buterin, to learn how he became the target of a publicity stunt that boosted his net worth by a few billion.

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Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. (Wikimedia Commons)

Who is Vitalik Buterin?

The Russian-Canadian programmer moved west as a six-year-old with his family. In the third grade, he was placed in a gifted program, allowing his math and programming interests to really flourish. When he was a 17-year-old, his father introduced him to the concept of cryptocurrencies for the first time. An inspired Buterin then turned all his attention to the fledgling economy. Unable to mine or buy Bitcoin (the only major crypto at the time), he found someone who was willing to pay in Bitcoin for blogs. For every blog he wrote, Buterin earned 5 Bitcoins. 

In late 2011, he founded Bitcoin Magazine with Mihai Alisie, a Bitcoin enthusiast in Romania. After school, he attended the University of Waterloo, completing five advanced courses while working as a writer and as a part-time assistant. During this time, he became a leading authority in the industry on crypto but was yet to go all-in. That happened in 2013. Buterin attended a crypto conference in San Jose, California. According to Wired, the "event was Buterin’s first glimpse at the living, breathing community cropping up around the cryptocurrency economy." "That moment really crystallized it for me," he told the magazine. "It really convinced me that, hey, this thing’s real and it’s worth taking a risk and jumping into. So I did."

Convinced he could make a difference, he wrote a white paper defining a new crypto - Ethereum. "As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good, fundamentally, completely, sound," he said. A couple of months later, he opened the Ethereum Foundation and began soliciting donations to build the network, which went online in 2015. As the founder, Buterin holds about 333,000 Ether. That collection is worth $1.3 billion in 2021. Forbes lists the 27-year-old Ethereum co-creator as the world’s youngest crypto billionaire.

Steve Waterhouse, Vitalik Buterin and Austin Hill during TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015 at Copper Box Arena on December 8, 2015 in London, England. (Getty Images)

How do you jump from $1.3 billion to $21 billion? If you are Buterin, you just sit back and wait for the money to roll in. In April, a group of Shiba Inu coin (SHIB) developers gifted around 505 billion SHIB to Buterin, for no reason. One crypto expert believes the developers did that in order to use Buterin's name to publicize SHIB, which was just founded and not a very popular currency at the time. By seeing Buterin 'investing' in it, the developers wanted to convince other investors that SHIB was a good choice. And it kind of worked, until he gave it away. Shiba Inu, a Dogecoin knockoff, is a meme coin that calls itself an "experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building." Unlike Dogecoin, it runs on the Ethereum network, where it has helped contribute to a surge this week in the price of transactions. 

Buterin is well known for his philanthropic efforts. In 2017, he donated $763,970 of Ether to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. In 2020, he donated $50,000 to the SENS Research Foundation. The donation to India's Covid-19 relief just happens to be one of the largest crypto donations in history. 

What is Ethereum?

According to their website, Ethereum is a technology that lets you send cryptocurrency to anyone for a small fee. It also powers applications that everyone can use and no one can take down. Ethereum is programmable, so you can also use it for lots of different digital assets – even Bitcoin! It's the world's programmable blockchain. This also means Ethereum is for more than payments. It's a marketplace of financial services, games and apps that can't steal your data or censor you. 

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