Today is the birthday of Vitalik Buterin: 26 candles for the Russian-Canadian programmer, Vitaly Dmitriyevich “Vitalik” Buterin, creator of Ethereum.

To mark his birthday, we will retrace some interesting and significant moments in his life. Vitalik was born in Russia in 1994 in Kolomna, where he lived until the age of 6 and then moved to Canada, Toronto where he attended a private school for talented children.

At the age of 17, Buterin discovered Bitcoin thanks to his father, who is a computer scientist, and this led him to start writing articles for a blog, where 5 BTC were offered to anyone who contributed.

In September 2011, he got in touch with the famous Bitcoin Magazine, becoming its co-founder and leading writer. Vitalk wrote for Bitcoin Magazine until mid-2014, while in the meantime, in 2012, he won the bronze medal at the International Olympics in computer science.

In 2013, his passion for programming and computer science increased and he published a first proposal for the Ethereum whitepaper, which led him, in 2014, to abandon the university and devote himself completely to the project.

His successes were not long in coming and in 2014 he won the Thiel Fellowship Award, receiving a $100,000 prize; the same year he won the World Technology Award, while in 2016 and 2018 he entered the Fortune list in the 40 under 40 section and in 2018 in the Forbes 30 under 30 ranking. Also in 2018, Buterin was granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Basel.

Interestingly, on June 25th, 2017, Buterin was the victim of the so-called “death hoax”: some information circulated, obviously false, about his premature death in a car accident, which even resulted in the Wikipedia page dedicated to him to write the date of his death, of course later removed.