In 2014, a 19-year-old Russian-Canadian named Vitalik Buterin released a white paper proposing a new platform that would enable people to build decentralized applications. The platform, which he called Ethereum, would use a blockchain to record transactions and run programs.
It would be open source, so anyone could build applications on it.
Buterin had first become interested in Bitcoin in 2011, when he was 17 years old. He started writing about Bitcoin and contributing to Bitcoin-related projects.
In 2013, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine.
The Ethereum white paper caught the attention of many people in the Bitcoin community, and Buterin began working on the Ethereum project with a team of developers in early 2014. The Ethereum blockchain went live in July 2015.
Since then, Ethereum has become one of the most popular platforms for building decentralized applications. It has also seen some major successes, such as the launch of the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) in 2016.
So did Vitalik Buterin invent Ethereum? While he was certainly the driving force behind its creation, it’s important to remember that Ethereum is a decentralized platform with many different contributors. So while Buterin may have invented Ethereum, it’s truly a community-built project.