Vitalik Buterin is the genius young man behind the evolution of ethereum. Born in 1994 in Russia to Russian parents Dmitry (a computer scientist) and Natalia Buterin, Vitalik moved to Canada with his parents in 2000 when his parents decided they needed to mark some extra money to take care of their family’s needs. A genius who could calculate three digits numbers in his head as twice the speed of his peers while in grade three. He soon got to realize that he was in love with mathematics, economics, and programming.
In 2011, while scouting for a motive in life, Vitalik was introduced to Bitcoin by his father and during this period, he was just 19 years old. At first, he was skeptical about it and tried to understand how non-physical cash could be so powerful and useful to the global market. He researched extensively and soon got to understand the beautiful features of bitcoin. His love for bitcoin grew, and he soon became a freelance writer, writing articles for blog known as the Bitcoin Weekly at an initial token of $1.5 per hour. A couple of month’s later, Mihai Alisie met with Vitalik and the peer cofounded Bitcoin Magazine.
In early 2012, Vitalik won a bronze medal during a high school international programming competition in informatics. When asked what his tactics were, Vitalik has this to say: “While others were making extensive use of command-and-control strategies, I had to think out of the box. I remembered what had happened to me some years back while I played World of Warcraft during which blizzard removed the damage component from my warlock’s Siphon Life spell, and I decided it was high time I created a system whereby each will be assigned to a specific function thereby making them act independently and objectively.”
In 2012, Vitalik gained admission into the University of Waterloo, but he soon dropped out of school when he realized he spent approximately 30 hours per week on crypto-currency projects. He needed to dedicate more time to the crypto world, and hence he decided to travel around the world in a bid to explore a good number of crypto projects which evolved into the evolution of Ethereum a decentralized crypto-currency in August 2014.
Vitalik is the co-founder of Ethereum, a blockchain crypto-currency which was developed by a Swiss nonprofit organization (Etherenum Foundation) of great minds all over the world. He and his team of geniuses ensured that the eliminated any form of third party interference, downtime inconsistencies, fraud, and censorship.
In a bid to get the project started Vitalik and his co-founders, launched a crowdfunding campaign where interested participants were given the opportunity to buy ethereum at a lower rate which also gave them the opportunity to function as shareholders to the Ethereum project. They were able to raise a whopping sum of 18 million United States Dollars making it one of the most successful crowdsale in history.
In 2014, Vitalik Buterin won the Thei Fellowship award and later that same year, he also won the Word Technology Award in software technology.
The upcoming hard fork in Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain will introduce critical updates in terms of introducing light clients as well as introducing the inactivity leakage mechanism to make life easy for stakers.
As the asset retested its all-time high, Ethereum traders and investors are eagerly awaiting the launch of CME’s Eth futures scheduled in four weeks.
The US SEC has accused Ripple of selling $1.3 billion worth of XRP as unregistered securities during its 2013 ICO. The Ripple lawyers say that the allegations are completely baseless and XRP is not an “investment contract”.
Buterin has asked users to maintain caution with the volatile asset class and revealed that he had sold half of his Bitcoin holdings in 2013 to avoid going broke.
With the full implementation of the scaling solutions, the Ethereum network will now be able to process up to 10,000 transactions per second.
Vitalik Buterin presented a detailed roadmap ahead for the transitions to the PoS Ethereum 2.0. He talked about sharding implementations and the use of scalability solutions like rollups.
The launch of Ethereum 2.0 today will be followed by other significant events including the ushering in of the Shard Chains and subsequently the merger of the current PoW Ethereum and the PoS Ethereum.
Coinbase said that it will support ETH 2.0 staking rewards in eligible jurisdictions starting from early 2021. Other crypto exchanges like Huobi, Kucoin, and Binance has also made similar announcements.
The continuous delay in the launch of Ethereum 2.0 threatens its dominance as market analysts question whether its development will be able to keep pace with the DeFi growth. Some new DeFi projects have already started looking for alternatives in the meanwhile.
Upon a successful upgrade on the 1st of December, Ethereum would shift from its current proof-of-work design to a proof-of-stake consensus protocol.