Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin started working on the ethereum project in 2013, after a number of months exploring different crypto projects around the world. Having first discovered bitcoin in 2011, he was initially sceptical, but quickly became excited by the potential of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. Buterin first introduced the ethereum project to the bitcoin.org community in January 2014, and shortly afterwards published a white paper describing in detail the technical design and rationale for the ethereum protocol. The same month, he formally announced ethereum at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami. Shortly afterwards, Buterin began working with Gavin Wood, who published the ethereum yellow paper in April 2014. That year saw the first sale of ether tokens, the creation of the Ethereum Foundation and the first DEVCON which brought together ethereum developers from across the world. The Ethereum Frontier network launched on July 30th, 2015. Buterin continues to lead Ethereum's research team, working on future versions of the Ethereum protocol. Buterin has written for a number of cryptocurrency publications. He received his first bitcoins in payment for articles he wrote for a blog called *Bitcoin Weekly*. In 2011 he co-founded *Bitcoin Magazine* with Mihai Alisie, and continued to write for the publication until 2014. *Bitcoin Magazine* was purchased by BTC Media in 2014. As well as his work on the ethereum protocol, Buterin has contributed as a developer to other open source software projects. These include the in-browser bitcoin wallet Kryptokit, the privacy-focused Dark Wallet and cryptocurrency marketplace Egora, as well a fork of bitcoinjs-lib, pybitcointools and multisig.info.