Vitalik was born in Kolomna, Russia, about 100 kilometers southeast of Moscow. He moved to Toronto, Canada, with his parents in 2000 at the age of six, where he attended school.
Vitalik developed a passion for computers and playing with Microsoft Excel at the age of four. His father, Dmitri Buterin, remembers his son writing a complex journal called "The Rabbit Encyclopedia," which was filled with mathematics, calculations, and tables, at the age of seven. Vitalik enrolled at the University of Waterloo in 2012 to study computer science.
During his travels, Vitalik realized that all existing cryptography projects were tied to specific applications and not general enough.
Vitalik released the Ethereum whitepaper in January 2013 and assembled a founding team within weeks, including Anthony Di Lorio, Mihai Alisi, Amir Schetert, and Charles Hoskinson. The team first met in person in January 2014, when they rented a house in Miami ahead of the North American Bitcoin Conference, and began working on the project and spreading the word.