Original Block unicorn Block unicorn May 19, 2025 17:01 Chongqing Article Author: Token Dispatch and Thejaswini M A
Article compiled by: Block unicorn
Foreword
A creator of a $314 billion financial ecosystem, dressed in a plain t-shirt, pondering humanity's future.
Vitalik Buterin, also known in the industry as 'V God', is a Russian-born genius who created Ethereum, changing the concepts of finance, art, governance, and digital ownership.
The entire ecosystem exists under the shadow of his architecture.
His influence extends from the boardrooms of Wall Street to developer hackathons on six continents. Central banks are building central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) based on his designs. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) powers thousands of projects handling tens of billions of transactions daily.
When he speaks, markets move. When he writes code, industries transform. When he donates $1.14 billion to charity, he does so without even making a public announcement.
As Ethereum, as an ecosystem, continues to advance in the crypto world, it is experiencing a difficult period, and Vitalik seems to be planning his most grand vision yet: to completely rebuild it while Ethereum continues to operate.
This once-crying genius, weakened by video games, is now one of the most influential technology experts in the most important financial revolution of our time.
From Russia to Canada: The Early Years
Vitalik was born on January 31, 1994, in Kolomna, about 113 kilometers southeast of Moscow, during the turbulent post-Soviet era in Russia.
His father, Dmitry Buterin, is a computer scientist, which laid the foundation for Vitalik's connection with technology.
Vitalik and his father Dmitry Buterin
When Vitalik was six, his family immigrated to Canada in search of better economic opportunities. This move marked the beginning of a new chapter, during which Vitalik's intellectual gifts gradually emerged.
In a primary school in Canada, teachers quickly recognized his mathematical talent. He could add and subtract three-digit numbers mentally at twice the speed of his peers. This led him to be enrolled in a gifted children's program, where Vitalik began to realize his uniqueness—especially attracted to mathematics, programming, and economics.
"I was never particularly inspired by the traditional education system," Vitalik later wrote. However, when he entered a private high school in Toronto, Abellard School, his perspective shifted dramatically. The school’s environment encouraged knowledge exploration and critical thinking, transforming Vitalik's relationship with learning.
His academic abilities continued to shine. In 2012, he won a bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, proving his programming prowess on the global stage. However, perhaps the most critical moment in his intellectual development did not occur in the classroom, but through a video game.
From 2007 to 2010, Vitalik was immersed in (World of Warcraft). When the game developers decided to remove the damage component of his beloved warlock skill 'Life Drain', he was deeply affected—reportedly crying himself to sleep that night. This incident gave him a profound understanding of centralized control.
This experience prompted him to seek alternative systems, free from the arbitrary rule changes of a single authority.
The Awakening of Bitcoin
At 17, Vitalik's father introduced him to Bitcoin. This concept piqued his interest and prompted him to conduct more in-depth research.
Wanting to participate in this emerging economy but lacking the computing power to mine or the funds to buy Bitcoin, Vitalik chose an unconventional path: he began writing articles about cryptocurrency for a blog, earning 5 Bitcoins (worth about $3.50 at the time) per article.
These early articles caught the attention of Romanian Bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie. In September 2011, they co-founded (Bitcoin Magazine), establishing one of the first serious publications focused on cryptocurrency. Despite his youth, Vitalik's articles exhibited a technical depth and thought that transcended his age.
Over the course of two and a half years, Vitalik immersed himself in the Bitcoin ecosystem, gaining a deep understanding of the potential and limitations of blockchain technology.
By 2013, Vitalik decided to fully immerse himself in cryptocurrency, abandoning his computer science studies at the University of Waterloo.
"I do remember the day he came back from university. His mom was visiting us at the time, so when he walked in, the three of us were there, me, Maya, and Natalia. Then he said, 'Hey, guys, I’m actually thinking about dropping out,'" his father Dmitry said.
He spent six months traveling the world, talking to developers and examining various blockchain projects. His findings revealed a truth: most projects were too narrowly focused on specific applications.
This observation sparked a key insight: what if blockchains could be programmed to accomplish almost any task, not just process financial transactions? What if developers could build applications directly on the blockchain?
By the end of 2013, at just 19 years old, Vitalik wrote a white paper outlining his vision for Ethereum—an entirely programmable blockchain platform that could support nearly any application developers could imagine, transcending Bitcoin's limited functionality.
The Birth of Ethereum
Vitalik's Ethereum white paper proposed a radical vision: a blockchain with a Turing-complete programming language that could theoretically solve any computational problem given enough time and memory. At its core is the concept of 'smart contracts': self-executing agreements with terms directly written into code.
People responded swiftly and enthusiastically.
Within weeks, a group of programmers, including Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin, and Charles Hoskinson, rallied around Vitalik's vision. In January 2014, they announced the birth of Ethereum.
To raise development funds, the team held its first Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in July 2014, exchanging Ether (ETH) tokens for Bitcoin. This issuance raised about 31,000 Bitcoins, then worth approximately 18 million dollars—this substantial amount indicated great confidence in the project's potential.
Meanwhile, Vitalik received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship established by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, aimed at supporting young entrepreneurs willing to drop out or skip college to pursue their ideas. This funding support allowed Vitalik to devote himself full-time to Ethereum.
After extensive development and testing, Ethereum officially launched on July 30, 2015. The first version was called 'Frontier', which, although basic, was fully functional and provided developers with a platform to start building decentralized applications.
Ethereum's design introduced several key innovations:
An account-based model, rather than Bitcoin's UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) system
Smart contracts that support complex self-executing agreements
Gas mechanism to measure and limit computational work
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), a Turing-complete execution environment
These features make Ethereum more flexible than Bitcoin, opening the door to applications that go beyond simple value transfer. Developers can now create token systems, financial derivatives, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), identity systems, and more on a single blockchain platform.
However, Ethereum's launch was not without challenges. In 2016, a decentralized venture capital fund project called The DAO was hacked due to a code vulnerability, resulting in the theft of millions of dollars worth of Ethereum, which posed an existential crisis for the young platform.
The community faces a difficult choice: whether to modify the blockchain to recover stolen funds, violating the principle of immutability, or to accept losses to maintain the philosophical integrity of the system?
Vitalik advocated for a 'soft fork' to recover funds. This position sparked controversy, leading to a schism in the community and ultimately resulting in a 'hard fork' of the blockchain. This resulted in the formation of two independent chains: Ethereum (the modified chain that recovered the stolen funds) and Ethereum Classic (the original unchanged chain).
This decision showcases a pragmatic side of Vitalik's leadership: a willingness to prioritize user protection over strictly adhering to ideological principles. This pragmatism has been a consistent theme in his subsequent approach to Ethereum's development.
Technical vision and evolution
Ethereum has always embraced continuous evolution. The refusal to cling to traditional architectures is both its greatest strength and its greatest challenge.
The price chart of the platform tells a story of extreme volatility—from a few cents at launch to nearly $4900 in November 2021, then plunging below $1000 during the 2022 crypto winter, and now stabilizing around $2605. Over the past decade, these fluctuations have tested the resolve of ETH supporters, who have endured promised upgrades, delayed timelines, and technical transformations.
For Ethereum believers, this journey has been an emotional rollercoaster. Early supporters envisioned rapid scaling solutions but had to exercise immense patience through years of development cycles. Some gave up during the lows, while the most loyal members of the community—'ETH maximalists'—remained steadfast through multiple market cycles.
Many critics overlook that Ethereum's seemingly slow development pace is, in fact, meticulously designed. Vitalik has always stood at the forefront of community development.
As a truly community-driven protocol, every major upgrade requires extensive research, multiple implementations, community debate, and rigorous testing. This governance model prioritizes safety and consensus over speed—an essential step when dealing with hundreds of billions of dollars in value.
Ethereum's decade-long journey has spanned several important milestones.
The roadmap Vitalik devised for Ethereum's future development revolves around several key phases, whimsically named:
The Merge: Completing the transition to Proof of Stake (PoS)
The Surge: Implementing sharding to enhance scalability
The Verge: Introducing Verkle trees to improve efficiency
The Purge: Reducing storage requirements
The Splurge: Enhancing quantum resistance
The recent Pectra upgrade (May 2025) advanced this roadmap by improving wallet functionality and validator economics, but the true north star remains Vitalik's vision: a blockchain as a globally neutral infrastructure for coordination and value exchange.
For validators, this upgrade raised the maximum staking limit from 32 ETH to an astonishing 2048 ETH, significantly reducing operational costs for institutional stakers. These improvements propelled ETH out of its recent price slump, rising from about $1615 in mid-April to over $2600 today, an increase of more than 60%.
However, just days before the launch of Pectra, Vitalik published a seemingly contradictory vision in his blog post (Simplifying L1), arguing that Ethereum must become 'almost as simple as Bitcoin' within five years.
He proposed replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine with RISC-V (an open-source instruction set architecture), claiming it could bring a '100-fold performance improvement' while making the system more developer-friendly.
This apparent contradiction—implementing the complex Pectra upgrade while advocating for thorough simplification—embodies Buterin's pragmatic approach: planning a more elegant future architecture while making necessary improvements to the current system.
Philanthropist and philosopher
In addition to his technical contributions, Vitalik often emerges as a philanthropist, using his cryptocurrency wealth to support various scientific, medical, and humanitarian causes.
In May 2021, he made headlines by donating $1.14 billion worth of Shiba Inu cryptocurrency (SHIB) to the Indian Crypto Covid Relief Fund to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. This donation led to a significant drop in the coin's price, but provided substantial aid at a critical moment.
His other significant donations include:
Donated $665 million to the Future of Life Institute, focusing on reducing existential risks, including those from artificial intelligence
Donated $763,970 worth of Ethereum to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute
Donated $2.4 million worth of Ethereum to the SENS Research Foundation for research on rejuvenation and lifespan extension
Donated $336 million worth of Dogelon Mars tokens to the Methuselah Foundation for longevity research
Donated $9.4 million worth of USDC to the University of Maryland for research on ultraviolet sterilization to prevent future pandemics
During the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, Vitalik supported relief efforts through cryptocurrency donations and public stances (including participation in initiatives such as Ukraine DAO).
At the core of Vitalik's personal philosophy is decentralization, egalitarian principles, and the potential for technology to create positive social change. His thoughts have evolved over time, shifting from what he described as 'anarcho-capitalist thinking' to more 'Georgist thinking' about public goods and common resources.
Recently, Vitalik expressed concerns about the potential existential risks that artificial intelligence may pose to humanity. In a blog post (My Technological Optimism) in November 2023, he argued that AI is 'fundamentally different' from other inventions (like guns, airplanes, and social media) because it may develop a new form of 'thinking' that could even be adversarial to humans.
"If a superintelligent AI decided to act against us, it could wipe out humanity entirely and end human existence," Vitalik wrote. "Even Mars might not be safe."
In response to these concerns, he advocates a philosophy he calls 'd/acc', focusing on defensive, decentralized, democratic, and differentiated technological development. This approach aims to advance beneficial technology while mitigating the risks of potentially harmful technologies.
Our Perspective
Vitalik Buterin's story reveals the contradictory forces shaping the blockchain revolution. His journey is both deeply technical and philosophically rich, challenging traditional narratives about tech founders and their creations.
Unlike the typical founder and CEO in Silicon Valley, Vitalik has eschewed the symbols of traditional corporate leadership. He does not lead through organizational authority but rather through the persuasive power of the ideas he publicly shares in blog posts and technical papers.
However, this leadership style has also led to tense relationships. Critics like Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, argue that Ethereum's governance still relies too heavily on Vitalik's direction. 'Everyone expects him to set the roadmap,' Hoskinson pointed out at a recent meeting. 'What would the next hard fork look like if you removed him from the equation now?'
This criticism touches on the fundamental challenge of decentralized projects: how to balance visionary leadership with truly distributed governance. Ethereum's success partially stems from Vitalik's technical insights and roadmap, but its long-term resilience requires moving beyond dependence on any single individual.
Ethereum's current transformation—from the immediate technical improvements of the Pectra upgrade to Vitalik's longer-term vision for thorough simplification—is less about isolated changes and more about a fundamental realignment of its approach. The recent positive market response indicates that investors believe in this dual strategy of immediate enhancements and long-term architectural innovation.
The contradiction between Vitalik's personal wealth and his philosophical commitments presents another paradox. While his net worth exceeds one billion dollars, he lives modestly, wearing simple clothes and focusing on intellectual pursuits rather than material ones. However, as one of Ethereum’s largest token holders, he benefits economically from the platform's growth—potentially conflicting with the fair, decentralized systems he advocates.
His way of handling these contradictions is quite enlightening. Vitalik does not pretend these contradictions do not exist; rather, he openly acknowledges them and examines the trade-offs of different developmental paths. This intellectual honesty sharply contrasts with much of the exaggerated marketing and tribalism in the crypto space.
In a field dominated by extremism and absolutist thinking, Vitalik offers an alternative model: the courage to explore knowledge, the willingness to revise opinions, and a commitment to building technology that serves human values rather than merely disrupting existing systems. Whether this approach can withstand market pressures and competing visions remains an open question—one that is likely to define the next chapter of both Ethereum and Vitalik's story.
