Ethereum (quotation ETH) has just minted its 13th billionaire and is the youngest on the list. Vitalik Buterin, born in Russia, is the last to be inducted into the prestigious “triple commas” club by Forbes.
A ten-figure heritage
The 27-year-old programmer and co-founder of Ethereum got to know bitcoin for the first time thanks to his father in the 2011. He broke the ten-digit mark on Monday, flying on the wings of a 325% Ethereum price hike to bring his personal wallet balance to 333.250 ETH or $ 1,09 billion.
Vitalik, who grew up in Canada, deepened his interests in blockchain technology with a short stint at Bitcoin Magazine in 2012. Thanks to a $ 100.000 scholarship for young developers, he founded his first major project, Frontier, which became the basis for the creation of the now famous Ethereum in 2015.
Ethereum, which is the second largest cryptocurrency in the world, with a market capitalization of over $ 400 billion, has surpassed $ 3.000. The owners therefore recorded an increase in value of more than 10% in less than 24 hours. The second most valuable coin in the world, it has maintained its market share of 15% making it the most committed blockchain for DeFi projects, all thanks to Vitalik's contribution over the past eight years.
Despite its continued advancements in the DeFi world, Ethereum still suffers from slow throughput issues and higher transaction fees. It is continually challenged by Binance and its Binance Smart Chain, which processes daily transactions approximately eight times faster than Ethereum at a lower transaction cost. Vitalik has revealed plans to upgrade with the ETH 2.0 platform that will address these issues in the current decade.
A billionaire very attentive to the community
A serial philanthropist; Vitalik has donated multiple times to different courses: a value of $ 763.970 in Ethereum to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2017, $ 1 million for refugees in Uganda, over $ 600.000 in Ethereum to India for COVID-19 relief, 2,4 , $ XNUMX million to the SENSE Research foundation for age-related disorders, among others.
Vitalik's giant strides within the blockchain ecosystem, despite abandoning the University of Waterloo to pursue his passion, have earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Brussels for his ingenuity.
With his latest insight, Vitalik will join XRP co-founders Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb to bring the number of billionaires co-founders of a cryptocurrency to three. The other ten are split between early investor categories such as Michael Saylor, Tim Draper, the Winklevoss and Changpeng Zhao brothers, Sam Bankman-Fried, Brian Armstrong, Tim Draper and Fred Ehrsam, who have made their fortunes as creators of transaction applications and cryptographic service applications such as Binance and Coinbase.
